Do you mean you would not recommend own business or accounting in general? Do you mind sharing why
TLDR Version: I would recommend self employment and/or business ownership to my sons if they had the personality and skills to make it viable.
Due to market forces, SAAS, the poor corporate work culture for accountants, the high stress in public accounting, and the compression at the self employment level, I would not recommend accounting to my sons unless they somehow just love the work itself.
Longer Versions:I would (will) 100% recommend owning a biz (or self employment which is different IMHO) to my sons
IF they have skills/career that would be a good fit as well as having the personality/drive to make it happen. It is hard to describe precisely what makes some cut out for business ownership and others not, but some general indicators would be:
1. A curiosity and natural bent to learn/study/research when they don't necessarily have to.
2. A consistent pattern of being able to follow through and get tasks accomplished even when they don't feel like doing it.
3. An understanding and ability to market and sell. Without a sale, no one has a business. This one can obviously be learned, but if you're too scared to try to sell someone on your idea, product, or service, probably better for you to stay an employee.
I probably will not recommend accounting as a profession for a few reasons:
1. Most accountants either work in public accounting and/or corporate accounting. There are not a lot of good paying, low stress accounting opportunities except for maybe government work, but the boredom factor is strong for those people I know working in those positions. Public accounting at the regional firm size and larger is extremely competitive and a complete rat race. Corporate accounting can be a better pace of life, but I don't know many who would say they enjoy their work. In corporate accounting, usually the better the pay, the more stress and hours needed.
2. At the self employment/firm ownership level, the market continues to change rapidly. There is a lot of corporate growth (which usually means the work is reserved for larger firms or internal employees) and a ton of growth in the self-employment/gig/freelancer economy. There is not a lot of growth/stability in the in between markets. This is just my opinion and I'm sure there are CPAs on this forum who would say otherwise, so don't take my thoughts on this point as the gospel. Because the middle market continues to shrink, the opportunity for good paying, stable businesses to serve shrinks as well.
3. Intuit and other software providers continue to sell their software to the public as a DIY solution to cut the accountant out of the equation all together. Even though software definitely reduces the time necessary to do accurate accounting, I believe it is not a proper substitute nor a true DIY option for 99.9% of the small biz owners out there. But that is obviously just my opinion, and the "market" is saying otherwise at this point.
To elaborate further on why I believe that to be a problem, now many SMBs bring their QuickBooks file to their tax person to prepare a return from. Without accurate data inputs, the tax person has absolutely nothing to base the creation of the tax return data on. So that either means the accountant spends time (or pays staff) to clean up the file during their busiest time of the year, or they hold their breath and try to create a return knowing that faulty data supports the tax return. Because the IRS is vastly underfunded, they do not tend to audit a lot of these small biz owners. They just don't have the resources or manpower. In a lot of ways, the entire concept of proper accounting and tax returns is being turned upside down in the small biz market and most people don't seem to care.