Guiding Your Kids to THEIR Good Life: Defining Aspirations

There are natural decision points as a kid grows up, when they have to make consequential choices about their life path. Each decision, in many ways, reflects and is constrained by its previous choices. Before they apply for a job, they have to narrow down a career path. Before their career path, they have to select an educational focus. Before they pick a major, they have to select a school. Before they select a school, they have to apply to that school and express their future career path plans. And before they apply to a school, they’ve made countless decisions about the type of student they are, which is reflected in their habits and self-concept, not to mention their transcript. 

No kid escapes feeling pressure in those moments. It starts way before college application season, too: well-intentioned aunts and uncles will grill a 7-year-old kid at the Thanksgiving table, “So, what do you want to do when you grow up?” It’s an ever-present anxiety.

We, of course, are often the ones who have to bring some of this pressure to bear. Some kids seem to be naturally wired for self-assurance and taking responsibility for their own lives. Most kids…aren’t. They need to be nudged and pushed. Parents and mentors are the ones who bring up the conversations that need to be had, intentionally making our kids uncomfortable, which we understand is a necessary part of discernment. 

As parents and mentors, we’ll only get a few shots to help them through those significant inflection points. I don’t want to blow it; I know you don’t either. We have to walk a narrow line, offering wisdom from our years of pattern recognition and guiding them delicately to consider long-term consequences without overwhelming them. The real magic is helping them think and choose for themselves, but that requires a level of clarity, self-confidence, and hope that is incredibly rare. Because stress, pressure, anxiety, and fear are always lurking, and those are horrible ingredients when it comes to making clear, informed, intentional choices. 

It’s tempting to oversimplify this process and tell our kids to just pick something they feel passionate about or “go where the jobs are.” But in reality, life is complex and so are we, so the discernment process we guide our kids through needs to reflect the nuance and all the variables at play. Fortunately, there’s a proven antidote to the stress, pressure, and anxiety they will inevitably feel. It comes through reflection, especially guided reflection, where kids are directed to think, explore, and declare what lies beneath their worries and consider the most critical aspects of their lives. 

Guiding our kids well means we understand the questions they need to answer for themselves. It means we share stories from our experiences with them. It looks like exposing them to experiences and people to expand their perspectives. And it looks like reflecting to them what you see, so they can get an accurate picture of themselves and develop awareness and confidence in who they’re wired to be. 

They also need us to help them identify and name their anxiety so they can see it for what it is: a distraction from the best path for them and a distortion of reality. Specifically, every kid has anxious questions that form like looming clouds over their discernment for their future career:

Prediction Anxiety

• Will I like it? Every kid wonders and worries whether they will enjoy the work they do, a byproduct of our culture’s emphasis on happiness. They hear the message throughout their lives about the importance of loving their job. Think of Mr. Incredible from the Pixar movie. His Hero’s Journey starts with a miserable guy working in a cubicle, denying his true potential and suffering every day as middle management crushes his soul. Kids inherit our priority of finding fulfillment through our careers, which adds a burden and makes their decision-making process much more complex. 

• Will I be good at it? It’s almost impossible to predict if you will be good at something, even if that subject comes easily to you. “She’s good at math,” you might say, which you then assume means she will excel at finance or perhaps engineering. But that might have more to do with the teacher, peers in class, or the curriculum than with natural aptitude. Ultimately, no one knows if they have what it takes until they step into the role and give it a shot.

• Will it still exist? We’re living in a rapidly changing job market. It feels like last week when you’d see headlines everywhere emphasizing how important STEM education is to a kid’s future. But since AI hit the mass market, it's hard to find anyone who would dare tout the benefits of learning to code. We know certain careers will stand the test of time, like plumbing and nursing. But artificial intelligence has thrown a wrench into our ability to predict what will even exist in just a few years. 

All three of those prediction anxieties make sense, and without understanding and naming them, our kids might get stuck in decision paralysis. What we want to do is help our kids move through the anxiety and confusion they feel so they can make confident, clear choices that will ultimately serve them in the future. That IS possible if we help them develop clear aspirations for their future life. 

Life Aspirations

Making a life choice by definition is narrowing down your options. It’s a moment when you restrict your perspective, cut off opportunities, and choose a route. It’s easy to forget in those moments how keeping a long-term perspective in your field of vision is still incredibly important, and we’re not just talking about a career vision. Rather, we want to help our kids get their own vision for different areas and aspects of their lives. Let’s call those aspirations- not necessarily career aspirations, although those are, of course, important. But aspirations for all areas of life, the aspects that fill up the meaning bucket, like family, friends, and community. 

Over the years, we’ve developed a specific exercise that’s proven valuable. It has very simple prompts for each life category: spiritual life, romantic life, family life, social life, community life, work life, creative life, and physical health. We guide kids through this exercise and give them time to think, write, and talk out loud their vision for each life category, using the following simple prompts:

• “I want my _______ life to look like…” 

• “I want to be a _______ who…”

When a kid starts to imagine their future life without restrictions or adult input, they begin to stamp their identity on who they’re becoming. If they keep that vision in view, they can use their imagination to guide their steps. They will start seeing their career choices in light of their other dreams, which will reduce their anxiety and give them a stronger sense of agency and confidence. They will most likely not do this exercise on their own, which underscores your role as a guide in their lives.