Stop Asking Kids What They Want to Be When They Grow Up

One of my earliest memories is a friend of the family asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up. At the time, I was maybe 4 years old and mostly concerned with conning my parents into giving me some extra TV time and getting back to my stories. It seemed silly to me then, just as it makes no sense to me now, that we expect children to have an answer to that question.

I'm sure I gave some mundane answer, if an answer at all. Over the years and the million times I've been asked that question since, I answered with firefighter, paleontologist, Ninja Turtle, and a myriad of other cliche responses. I didn't know then, and despite being very happy in my current profession, I still wouldn't know how I would respond to that question.

We don't expect children to know where they're going to live when they grow up, who or if they're going to marry, or how many tattoos they plan on getting. Childhood is about exploring and figuring out who they want to be, and while this questions attempts to help kids plan for their future, for some it can cause undo stress.

To put it bluntly, that question freaked me out. All the other normal questions you ask a child I understood and had prepared answers for. Favorite color? Yellow. Favorite food? Pizza, just like Michelangelo. But expecting me to pick a career when I had just learned how to tie my shoes wasn't going to happen.

First, it seemed like no matter what answer I gave, there was always a response from the adults. When I told people I wanted to be a firefighter I got a firm and gendered, "Girls don't do that." When my mom was a kid, she remembers the question being phrased differently. "Do you want to be a nurse, teacher, secretary, or librarian?" she would be asked, clearly given the only acceptable options for a woman in the workforce.

I'd like to think that the world has become a different place since I was last asked what I wanted to be, but based on the abysmal number of female engineers, coders, and other STEM-related positions, I don't think I'm going to be pleasantly surprised.

Besides the obvious gendered implications, expecting children to pick a job, even if it's for some blithe response, already pigeon holes them into a particular world.

For a while, I started telling people I was going to be a teacher, like my parents. And I did it, I taught English for seven years, and while I enjoyed it, there was a part of me that chose that profession for a while because it was what was expected of me.

I had no idea what kind of jobs were going to be possible when I was a kid. Raised in the early days of the internet, it seemed unfathomable that I could think beyond the basic jobs and envision a new world of professions. Sixty-five percent of future jobs haven't even been created yet; many of them will come about as a result of our children.

Children are naturally divergent thinkers, so instead of expecting them to give some trite answer about what they want to be, maybe we can ask them think about the world differently. "How can we make the world better?" is one such question I plan on asking my son as soon as he starts answering in full, intelligible sentences. I'll try my best to record his responses as he gets older, mostly so we can later comment about how adorable he was.

I hope that my son's experience in the world won't be limited to one profession or idea. We are not our jobs, and while they are an important part of being an adult, they are not the only part.