What haunted a Stanford dean after one student's blunt question

Think back to when you were six years old and an adult asked what you wanted to be when you grew up. Chances are, whatever came out of your mouth had already been shaped by someone else, a parent's job, a neighbor's career, a character from a bedtime story. That's not really our own invention, and Julie Lythcott-Haims argues we tend to forget how much we then do the same shaping to our own children, usually without noticing.

Picture a mother sitting across the dinner table from her eleven-year-old son, going through the activity choices for the coming school year. He mentions, almost in passing, that he'd like to try the school's mock trial club. She hesitates. It doesn't fit the science-and-music track she and her husband have mapped out since preschool, the one she's convinced will keep his options open for a strong college application. She suggests debate instead, something 'more useful.' He shrugs and agrees. Neither of them notices that his interest has just been quietly redirected.

Lythcott-Haims found the clearest articulation of this pattern in a question a Stanford undergraduate named Chi Ling Chan asked out loud during a campus talk: what is shaping the way we dream? Chi Ling, who grew up inside Singapore's high-pressure school system, told Lythcott-Haims afterward that our dreams aren't limitless; they're bounded by what the people around us have shown us is possible and respectable. A child raised around finance executives dreams differently than a child raised around musicians, not because one child is more ambitious, but because their sense of the available world is different.

The uncomfortable extension of Chi Ling's question is what it does to parents who believe they're simply being supportive. Every time we steer a child's activity, major, or ambition toward what we already believe leads to success, we're not expanding what they can dream. We're deciding it for them, one small redirection at a time, and calling it guidance.

Try asking your child open questions about what genuinely interests them before you suggest an activity, a class, or a major, and actually wait for the answer instead of filling the silence. Notice the moments when you're steering a choice toward something that will look good on paper rather than something they're curious about, and name that to yourself. Let them try something with no obvious value for a college application, whether that's a sport they'll never be best at or a subject with no clear career path, and resist ranking it against what other kids are doing. Over time, pay attention to whether your child describes their own interests using their own words, or repeats language that sounds like yours.