Parents have been steering their children into science and technology fields for so long that some of those kids are grown with little ones of their own. Their advice? Careers in the humanities, arts or skilled trades might be safer bets for the next generation.

Bots that write software and perform surgical tasks inspire fear that today's glut of STEM majors are in a bubble, kind of like their predecessors who flooded finance programs in the roaring '80s. From 2009 to 2022, the number of bachelor's degrees awarded in computer science nearly tripled, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

If the people who work on tech's cutting edge think their children should reverse course, then maybe the rest of us ought to reconsider our parental guidance.

Dan Dumont recently did what any responsible engineering director would do: He asked his favorite artificial-intelligence assistant whether his children, ages 2 and 1, should follow in his footsteps.

Maybe not, the bot warned. It recommended fostering creativity and people skills, while stopping short of prescribing specific jobs for the toddlers.

The advice jolted Dumont, 38, who works at a software startup in Greater Boston. He thought back to his time at a vocational school in Massachusetts two decades ago, when he felt confident that enrolling in college and launching a tech career was more promising than the blue-collar paths of most classmates. His professional life has generally reinforced that belief.

Now, as he and his wife mull a home renovation with their third child due this summer, he suspects the odds could be different for his kids. "Maybe they should be contractors or electricians," he says. "Maybe we shouldn't push them into technology."

More parents are coming to the same conclusion, says David Ferreira, spokesman for the Massachusetts Association of Vocational Administrators. He says vocational school was long looked-down-on in a state known as a science and tech hub.

"It was where other people's kids went -- kids who learned with their hands and who were not college material," he says of many white-collar parents' thinking.

Not anymore. Ferreira says 1 in 5 Massachusetts high-schoolers is in a vocational program, about 30% more than a decade ago. And trade schools that used to accept virtually everyone now have hundreds of teens on wait lists. Demand is so high that several mainstream public high schools in the state are reviving or expanding shop classes, part of a nationwide trend.

Parents who pictured their children in desk jobs are drawn to vocational education because the schools have upped their academic standards and provide a hands-on hedge against AI, according to Ferreira.

"They see a dual pathway where their kids can go to this kind of school and have options at the end," he says. "They're qualified to go on to college or go directly into the workforce."

Jeannie Chung deals with constant anxiety about children's career prospects -- and she doesn't even have kids yet.

She works in Washington state as an applied AI lead at a large tech company and has become an unofficial counselor to the many parents in her social circle who want inside advice.

"Jobs that require just logical thinking are on the chopping block, to put it bluntly," she says. "I think the pendulum is swinging back to the creative side of things."

Chung, 32, initially wanted to major in English and become a fiction writer. Her parents worried there was little money in the liberal arts, so she studied biomedical engineering and electrical computer engineering instead.

There were 30 students in her introductory computer science class at Duke. The same course had more than 300 students by the time she graduated.

She developed a genuine interest in technology. But Chung also says she and many peers "rode the wave" to careers that appeared lucrative and safe, instead of following their passions.

How ironic, 10 years later, to see the recent spate of tech-sector layoffs. Not that novel writing is a sure ticket to stability, but rapid labor-market changes show the potential folly of trying to predict hot jobs for your kids. If someday Chung has a daughter who wants to be a book author? "I'll be like, 'Work on your style and work on your voice,'" she says. " 'Your creativity is your value.'"

Technology training has seemed like a golden ticket to Rajeev Madumba since he came to the U.S. from India in the early aughts.

"Coding was not my cup of tea, but it was evident that this was the next frontier, so I did an M.B.A. in information systems and e-commerce," he says.

It served him well. Madumba, 52, leads the global healthcare practice at 22nd Century Technologies in McLean, Va.

Like a lot of parents who watched tech companies hit trillion-dollar market values, he urged his two children to learn Python and other computer programming languages when they were young. He figured it would be a valuable skill in their back pockets.

Now he's not sure whether an entry-level coding job is a reliable fallback plan -- or if such a role will even exist in the future.

These days he's encouraging his teenage daughter's musical interests while she looks at colleges and considers majoring in biology. He's noticed the woman who runs their local dance studio appears to earn a nice living -- and her job looks relatively bot-proof. "I keep telling my daughter, if nothing else works out, you could still help others learn to sing and dance and you should be OK," he says.