What To Do When Your Teen Has No Idea What Career They Want
The crinkle of the taco truck foil was still sharp when my sister leaned across the kitchen table, wiping guacamole off her thumb, and asked my 17-year-old daughter Mia, “So what are you thinking for that college major you’re supposed to lock in next month?” Mia stared at her cilantro-lime rice for 10 full seconds, then shrugged and said, “I don’t know. A job? I guess.”
I work part-time as a high school guidance counselor, so I see this exact shrug three or four times a week in my office. But when it came from my own kid, I still felt that familiar, tight flip in my gut — the same one every parent gets when we’re suddenly convinced we’ve messed up, that our kid will graduate and wander forever because they can’t name their dream job at 17.
Right after dinner, I almost fell for the same mistake I see parents make all the time. I pulled up the district’s official career personality test on my laptop, said we could knock it out over ice cream, and it would give us some ideas. Mia rolled her eyes and reminded me she’d already taken it at school. It told her she was suited for two careers: librarian or funeral director. “Neither sounds terrible,” she said, “but that’s not helpful.” She was right. Tests give you labels, not actual information about what it’s like to get up and go to work every day.
A couple days later, I tried something I’ve started recommending to parents after 12 years in this job, something I picked up after seeing hundreds of teens shut down when we talk about “life plans.” We were driving to the sports store to get new running shoes, no laptops, no notebooks on the table, just casual chat. I said, “Forget majors and careers for a minute. Just tell me three days you’ve had lately that didn’t feel like a total drag. Doesn’t have to be big, just any days.”
Mia thought for a minute, then listed them. First: the Wednesday she stayed after school to help the middle school art teacher set up for the spring show, carrying canvases, hanging frames, and talking to 7th graders about their clay mugs. Second: the Saturday she and her friend spent editing footage they’d shot for the local animal shelter’s adoption social media reels. Third: the previous Sunday, when she’d rearranged my entire bookshelf and reorganized the pantry by category, just because it calmed her brain.
I didn’t jump to anything. I just said, “Huh, that’s interesting. All three of those have you organizing something someone else made, then helping show it off to other people. Did you notice that?” She paused, then said, “Yeah, I guess I did.” That’s way more useful than any test result. We’re not picking a career that day, we’re just finding a pattern of things that don’t feel like work to them.
From there, the next step is tiny, low-stakes, and free. I texted my neighbor who runs a small graphic design business out of her basement — she does branding and social media for local shops, which hits that organizing and showing off other people’s work pattern. I asked if Mia could sit with her for one Friday afternoon, no commitment, no expectations, just see what she does all day. I told Mia to ask three specific questions when she was there, no generic “how did you get into this” stuff: What does a regular Tuesday morning look like for you? What’s the part of your job no one tells you about before you start? If you could change one thing about your average work day, what would it be?
Mia came back from that afternoon and said she didn’t want to be a full-time graphic designer. But she liked that half her day was coordinating client projects and half was tweaking designs to make them work better. That’s more information than we’d gotten in two years of asking “what do you want to do?”
I’ve started telling parents to stop thinking of this as a problem to fix right now. Most people don’t walk out of high school with a straight career path anyway — my own brother worked at a hardware store for two years after graduation before he figured out he wanted to be a teacher, and he’s now the most loved principal at his school. If your kid wants to work at a coffee shop for a gap year, or take general ed classes at community college before picking a major, that’s not wasting time. That’s collecting data. If they already have a part-time job, just ask them once a month over dinner: “What part of your shift would you do for free if you had to?” That one small question turns ordinary work into information about what they enjoy.
Another tiny trick I share: have them make a blank folder in their phone’s notes app, label it whatever they want, and tell them to drop anything in there that sounds even a little interesting when they see it. A TikTok of a person who restores old books? A friend talking about their mom’s job as an event planner for a zoo? Drop it in. No need to sort it, no need to talk about it unless they want to. After a few months, patterns pop out that you’d never get from a formal assessment.
Last night, Mia was scrolling TikTok before bed, stopped, and held her phone out to me. It was a video of a woman who organizes private art collections for collectors, helping people catalog their pieces and hang them in their homes. “That sounds so weird,” Mia said, “but I think I’d like doing that.” I didn’t jump up to pull up college programs or start making a plan. I just said, “That does sound cool. Fits that whole organizing people’s nice things thing you like.” She nodded and went back to scrolling.
We still don’t have the answer. She’s applying to a few liberal arts schools that let you declare your major sophomore year, and that’s good enough for me right now. The job she ends up doing in 10 years might not even exist today. Panicking and forcing her to pick something just to check the box won’t help anyone. It just makes teens shut down and stop talking about what they actually enjoy. Right now, collecting patterns and trying tiny, low-stakes experiments is working. We’ll see where it goes.
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