Finding a Place to Belong: A Guide for Parents and Children
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
What a strange question when you think about it. Yet it’s one we automatically ask children when we meet them, as though at six, eight or even eighteen years old they should already have a plan for their entire future.
Most children don’t know. Unless you count the occasional astronaut, footballer or YouTuber, their dreams are usually just that — dreams.
And, if I’m honest, nearly fifty years in, I’m still not entirely sure what I’m doing. I might, however, finally know what I want to feel.
My sons both went through school being told they weren’t academic. One teacher even asked me at an early parents’ evening, “What are we going to do with your boys?” I went home and cried.
She had a point, in a way. One of my sons spent years running around the house with a bucket on his head pretending to be in the army. That was his ultimate career ambition for a long time.
Fast forward a few years and he is now a chef, earning considerably more than me.
My other son discovered that he loved science and wanted to become a vet or a doctor. However, when he started Sixth Form, the college told him his Maths grade wasn’t high enough and suggested he changed his subject choices. He was given just a few hours to rethink the future he had imagined.
After looking at other options, including game development and barber training at another college, he chose business and economics.
I will never forget him sitting in my car, sobbing: “Why do they want us to choose so early? I don’t know what I want to do yet!”
I completely understood how he felt. And I wonder how many children feel the same. We ask them what they want to be before they have even discovered what they enjoy, what they are good at, or what kind of person they want to become. As parents, we worry so much about whether our children are on the right path, but perhaps there isn’t one single path at all.
The irony is that many adults don’t actually work in the area they trained for anyway. My own career journey certainly doesn’t resemble a neat path on a careers map. This wasn’t because I had carefully planned a varied and exciting career; it was because life happened. Looking back, though, I realise that none of the jobs I had was wasted. Every experience gave me something useful — confidence, resilience, communication skills and those all-important “transferable skills” employers talk about.
If you had asked the six-year-old me what I wanted to be, I would probably have said something involving animals. Livestock, horses, farming — anything connected to that world. Despite having no farming background, it was where my heart was.
Had equine or agricultural studies been offered at school, perhaps I would have followed that route. But they weren’t, so I didn’t.
Life, however, rarely follows the route we had mapped out. Sometimes the choices we make are not really choices at all, but the options available to us at the time.
After having children, my own employment choices narrowed considerably. Performing, the career I had trained for, became much harder to follow, and I often chose work that fitted around my children rather than work that matched my dreams. Like many parents, I adapted. Not because I’d stopped dreaming, but because family came first. Parenthood changes career plans in ways no careers adviser can predict.
In 2017, after a chance meeting with the woman who would become my franchisor, I opened my own drama school for children. I never saw myself as a businesswoman, and I still don’t really, but it was the right thing at the right time.
By then, I had developed confidence in my abilities. My previous jobs had given me experience and skills I didn’t realise I had. I couldn’t have done it in my thirties, let alone my teens, and I certainly wouldn’t have chosen it at sixteen.
It was a stop on the journey, but not the final destination.
I closed the business last year. Illness, losing two friends far too young, and watching my children become young adults made me stop and think about what I really wanted.
Sometimes the path we take to get somewhere makes no sense until we look back. Somehow, after all those twists and turns, I found myself closer to the dream I had as a child.
I now help a friend rear calves, deliver medicines for a farm vet, work for a wellbeing farm, and learn something new all the time. I bimble around the vegetable patch, feed my chickens and, finally, feel calmer. It feels like I’ve found where I’m meant to be.
Looking back, I realise that my dreams have changed many times. Not because I failed, but because life changed me. Circumstances changed. Priorities changed. I changed.
As my sons begin their own career journeys, I hope they find their way to happiness sooner than I did. I hope they understand that success doesn’t always mean following the first path put in front of them. Perhaps our job as parents is not to have all the answers for them, but to help them stay curious, try new things and trust that their path will unfold in time.
And perhaps the best reminder that our early labels do not define us is my “non-academic” son, who was once told to rethink his options and is now about to start a Master’s degree in economics. I hope one day he gets the chance to return to his old primary school and give a careers talk.
Because dreams change.
Goals change.
Priorities change.
And if someone asked me today, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
My answer would simply be: At peace.
