By Dave Hersh
Ask a teenager what they want to be when they grow up, and you'll probably get a shrug, a joke, or an answer they think you want to hear. Ask them what they actually need to get there, and the conversation changes completely.
We keep asking the wrong question.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” assumes a straight line: pick a path, follow it, arrive. College, or maybe the military, then a career, then a life. That question made sense in a world that isn’t the one young people are growing up in now.
What if ‘what you want to be’ was never the point?
Spoiler: for most young people, it isn’t. What they’re actually asking for is support. And support and having a job are not the same thing.
This is the third post in our series documenting what happens when we let young people analyze their own data. Read our first post, about the process, here, and the second post, about mental health and well-being, here or here.
We asked our Youth Partners open-ended questions about their futures. Of the 130+ responses, we heard similar themes about uncertainty and preparedness. We then asked a group of Youth Partners to make sense of what their peers said. Here’s what they found.
Adults tend to hear future anxiety as a normal milestone every generation passes through. When young people looked at the data themselves, they read it differently: as a rational response to systems that no longer add up.
One theme came through again and again: the “traditional path” — college, or the military, then a stable career — feels less like a launchpad and more like a trap.
“The debts we take on are larger… everything requires more commitment than… 20 years ago.”
Young sense-makers pushed back on the idea that hesitation about college means a lack of ambition. It’s not ambition that’s missing. It’s a trust that the traditional path still leads somewhere good.
“There’s … an overlooked insight that uncertainty doesn’t mean lack of motivation; it often means young people are aware of how complex and unstable the world has become.”
Youth Partners described AI and automation as something closer to a threat to their creative ownership and their shot at even entry-level jobs. This is a direct contrast to the common narrative that AI is a distraction or cheating risk or just something kids commonly use nascently.
Peer sense-makers noted something adults often miss: it’s not just that jobs might disappear. There’s growing uncertainty about whether the skills young people have spent years building will still be worth anything by the time they’re ready to use them.
“I think having ChatGPT is a powerful tool, but also inhibits our problem-solving skills. Maybe give us a workload that is manageable so we don’t feel super stressed and the need to turn to AI to save time”
Concerns about AI are not limited to jobs, however. Youth Partners seem to have internalized how technology – devices, social media, etc. – are impacting their well-being and society more broadly. Peer sense-makers captured how AI is seen as part of an anxiety-inducing trend.
“The main message I hear is that social media as well as AI should be regulated in some way to combat the negative effects seen in the growing generation of youth today.”
Stop asking “what do you want to be.” Start asking, “What do you need to thrive?” Those are different questions with different answers, and only one of them fits the world young people are actually growing up in.
“I would tell adults and organizations to focus less on telling young people what they should do and more on helping them understand their options. That means providing honest mentorship, practical life skills, and exposure to multiple pathways… [T]hey should create spaces where uncertainty is treated as normal, not as failure.”
That means youth-serving organizations, schools, and EdTech developers need to move past surface-level advice and get serious about co-designing new paths. Adults and elders don’t automatically need to assume that college and the military are the only real options to future success, even if that path brought them good fortune. It means adults be willing to let go of the map they grew up with and let young people help draw a new one.
Young people don’t need or want rescue. They’re asking to be trusted to build their own future and appreciate support along the way.
Stay tuned for our next post …
