A question that sounds innocent
Almost every parent has asked it. Practically every child has tried to answer it. The question seems innocent enough. But in my experience, it is one of the heaviest burdens we routinely place on young people’s shoulders. There are better questions we could be asking.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” The question presumes a resolution. It asks a child to name one answer that will hold up across decades. A doctor. A lawyer. A teacher. An astronaut. Sure. Why not? Except that the shape of an actual life is rarely so tidy.
A life unfolds through layered, often unpredictable decisions. The pediatrician becomes a novelist. The engineer starts a nonprofit. The classroom teacher becomes the mayor. The corporate lawyer becomes a chef. Accountants become photographers. Surfers run private equity deals. Scientists become social media stars. People shift, combine, and reinvent themselves entirely. To ask a twelve-year-old to pick what they will do for the rest of their life misunderstands how a life works.
Identity keeps changing
In adolescence, a young person is figuring out who they are. That work is identity building, and it does not end. Many of us assume that one day we will have our identity settled and finished. We will not. We are all different tomorrow than we are today. A learner who is practicing curiosity, generosity, resilience, and honesty is becoming someone new every day. If who they are keeps changing, why should what they do stay fixed?
A destination question can do harm
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” is a destination question. A destination question asks a moving person to give a stationary answer about themselves, and that can do lasting harm. Asked too often and too early, it presses young people to commit to a path before they have lived enough to know who they want to become, let alone what they want to do in any given chapter of their lives.
We have all met the forty-year-old who decided at twelve that they would be a doctor and still feels they cannot revise the choice. Or the learner who picked a college major at sixteen because a parent asked them to, and then spent their twenties unwinding it. Destination questions reward a confident answer at the expense of discovery.
Better questions to ask
There are better questions. Questions that support identity building, not by asking who a learner will become, but by inviting them to say what they are curious about. The first and best of them is simple. What ignites your spark?
What do you care about? What can you not stop thinking about? What problems do you want to spend your time on? What kind of people do you want around you? What does a good day look like to you? What do you want the world to see in you?
These ask a young person to describe a direction, not a destination. They open the door to a child’s real spark of genius, which is the thing parents most want to see.
What this looks like at Franklin Global
This is the question we built Franklin Global to ask. We designed the school to help a young person name a direction and then explore it widely, holding many futures open at once rather than pressing for a single answer too soon. Over the years, our Dwight/Franklin graduates have become doctors and architects, founders and teachers, public servants and artists. They have built nonprofits, led companies, run for office, and written novels. Few of them had their pathways set at twelve. What they share is an education that helped them form a sustained relationship with their own becoming.
Keep asking, keep listening
Our job as parents and educators is simple. We need to keep asking the better questions. Ask them often. Listen to the answers carefully, because they will change. A young person invited to ignite their spark of genius and grow into their own becoming will find work they enjoy and a life they love. Discovery will be their compass and sail as they navigate into their future.