Outside In | Let kids be kids: Making 5-year-olds plan their careers is a load of mud pies

While there is a mismatch between the skills our economies need and the jobs our youngsters dream about, that is no excuse for rushing them into career planning

Life takes us in unexpected directions and we can’t know what skills will be useful in the future, so let kids relax and embrace where life takes them

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A child plays with a lamb on her family’s ranch in Alxa Left Banner, north China’s Inner Mongolia autonomous region, on April 1, 2020. There’s no need to stress kids with pressure about future careers. Photo: Xinhua

Published: 8:15am, 4 Feb 2023

I thought Margaret Heffernan, a lecturer in management at the University of Bath, was venting about Chinese “tiger mums” pressing their three-year-olds to learn a second language or play the cello when she recently protested against an initiative aimed at five- to eight-year-olds encouraging them to think about their dream jobs.

Instead, she was talking about a UK not-for-profit, Education and Employers, that has championed the need to get primary school kids to think early about their careers. Their biggest initiative was “Drawing the Future”, when in 2018 they got 20,000 kids worldwide to draw pictures of what they wanted to be when they grew up.

More than 20 per cent wanted to be professional athletes – mainly footballers – and 11 per cent wanted to be teachers. Many boys wanted to be police officers or soldiers while many girls wanted to be hairdressers. Some of the more ambitious wanted to be veterinary surgeons.

Most striking was the mismatch between the skills our economies need and the jobs our youngsters dream about. Only 0.4 per cent imagined themselves in business, fewer than the 0.6 per cent who wanted to be an astronaut. Even fewer dreamed of being an accountant or in office administration. I can only imagine the depressing disillusion ahead.

Heffernan asked, “Do you remember being five?” She recalled dim memories of playing with friends and making mud pies. This got me thinking about when I first thought about what I wanted to be when I grew up.

As a working-class kid in a public housing estate in the British Midlands, I recall my world was rather small and mostly comprised of being bullied by my strong-minded little sister. My mother generated no “tiger mum” pressure, not least because I nearly died in a car accident when I was four. She was simply relieved I was alive.