My Teenager Has No Idea What Career to Choose: What I Learned As a Mom and High School Counselor
Last Tuesday, I cleared chicken scraps off the dinner table and found my 17-year-old Javi’s course planning sheet tucked under an empty soda can. The line that read “post-grad career interest” was completely blank. I pushed it across the counter toward him, where he was scrolling TikTok on the kitchen stool. “You forgot this part,” I said.
He didn’t look up. “I didn’t forget. I don’t have an answer.” When I prodded a little, he locked his phone and said, “Everyone else is putting pre-engineering or nursing or whatever. I don’t want to pick something just to fill the line.”
That line hit close, because I hear that exact statement at least three times a week in my office down at the high school, where I’ve been a counselor for 12 years. This year, four out of 10 juniors I check in with leave that same career line blank. When I first started this job, I’d badger them to put something, anything, down. I thought a blank spot meant they weren’t thinking about the future at all.
I learned my lesson 10 years ago with a student named Mia. She told me she liked spending weekends helping her grandma at her small plant nursery outside of town. I told her that was a perfectly good career interest, so she wrote down horticulture, applied to a four-year degree program, and got in. Halfway through her first year, she called me crying. She hated the required soil chemistry and plant genetics classes, and what she actually liked was helping the local elementary school classes that took field trips to the nursery. She wanted to be an elementary school teacher, but she was scared to switch majors and “waste” the time and money she’d already spent. That conversation stuck with me. I’d pushed her to make a permanent choice way before she had any idea what she actually enjoyed doing day to day.
Now, the first thing I do when a kid (or my own kid) says they have no clue what they want to do is swap out the big scary question for a smaller, specific one: “What’s the last thing you did that made you forget to check your phone?” I tried that with Javi that Tuesday night. He thought for a minute, wiped pizza grease off his hoodie, and said, “Fixing Luka’s old dirt bike last Saturday. We messed with the engine for three hours, and I didn’t even notice my phone died.”
That’s it. That’s the starting line, not the final answer. The next concrete step I suggest to parents and kids alike is a low-stakes “taster” instead of a formal internship or job shadow. Formal shadows require paperwork, permissions, and a whole day of commitment that can feel overwhelming for a kid who’s already unsure. Most small local business owners don’t mind a curious kid hanging out for two or three hours after school once a week, no pay, no commitment required, just helping with small tasks and seeing what a regular work day actually looks like.
I called the independent mechanic who fixes our family van, and he said Javi could come in one afternoon a week for a month to help with oil changes, organize parts, and whatever else he’s needed for. It’s not going to commit him to anything, but it’ll let him see if fixing engines for 40 hours a week is as fun as fixing one dirt bike for three hours on a Saturday. For another student I saw last month who kept saying he only liked playing video games, we reached out to the manager of the local recreational esports league and asked if he could sit in on a couple events to help set up streaming equipment. He realized he hated managing tournament brackets, but loved troubleshooting the audio and visual gear, so now he’s looking into that side of the industry instead.
I know the panic that hits parents when their teen says they don’t know what they want to do. We’ve all heard the stories about kids wasting tens of thousands of dollars on college degrees they never use. I felt that panic with Javi, too. My first instinct when he said he liked fixing bikes was to wonder if that paid as well as the software engineering path his dad kept suggesting. But I’ve seen the opposite waste far more time and money: kids who pick a career at 17 just to please their parents or fill a blank line, and spend their 20s stuck in a job they hate.
The biggest shift I’ve made as a counselor and a mom is stopping myself from leading with “how much money will that make?” when a kid brings up a random interest. It’s okay to revisit that question later, once they’ve figured out if they even like the work. If they love it, they’ll figure out how to make a living at it, whether that means opening their own shop, moving into management, or shifting to a related field down the line.
Right now, Javi still hasn’t filled in that blank line on his course planning sheet. He came home from the mechanic’s last week covered in grease, said unclogging a caked gas line was the grossest thing he’d ever done, and still asked if I could pack him an extra sandwich for this week’s shift. He’s signed up for the auto mechanics elective next semester instead of the extra AP history I suggested a few months back. He might hate it after a semester. He might switch to that photography thing he talked about last summer, or end up in education like me, or end up in a career that didn’t even exist when I was his age.
The blank line isn’t a failure. It’s just what it looks like when a 17-year-old is taking their time to figure out what fits. I’d rather he have a blank line now than a wrong answer that takes him a decade to fix.
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