That Youth Day Reflection

This past Youth Day, I did some reflections. I realised that there was a time when I thought having an ambition was something every child was supposed to have.

I remember being in primary school many years ago when one of my teachers, Miss Tan Lily, told our class that it was important for us to have an ambition from young. Her reasoning was simple enough. An ambition gave us direction. Once we knew what we wanted to become, we could focus our energy on the subjects we needed, work towards the qualifications required and slowly make our way towards that destination.

It made sense to me. At least, it made sense in the way many things make sense to a primary school child when an adult explains them with enough confidence.

If you want to be a doctor, study science. If you want to be a lawyer, do well in your languages. If you want to be an engineer, pay attention to mathematics. Decide where you want to go and then start walking.

Except that there was one problem. I did not know where I wanted to go. I did not have an ambition.

I remember other children answering the familiar question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” with the confidence of people who had already signed their employment contracts. Some wanted to be doctors. Some wanted to be lawyers. Some wanted to be pilots. Others wanted to be teachers, police officers or engineers.

I had nothing.

I was a child. I wanted to play. I wanted to read things that interested me. I wanted to do things that seemed fun at the time. I did not spend my afternoons contemplating my future career trajectory. Frankly, I was still trying to figure out what I wanted for dinner.

Looking back, though, I realise that my lack of ambition was not entirely because I was incapable of imagining a future. It was partly because so much of my future had already been imagined for me.

My parents had their own ideas of what I should achieve. I sometimes felt like a trophy that could be brought out during family gatherings and festive occasions. There was a certain pride attached to what I achieved in school, and when I fell short of those expectations, my parents sometimes changed the story slightly when speaking to other people.

At the time, I thought the lies were rather harmless. Suppose I scored three As and one B. The story told to relatives would become four As. Technically, the difference was only one grade.

What was the big deal?

It was not as though they had transformed a complete academic disaster into a national scholarship. One B had simply been promoted to an A. A small administrative adjustment, if you will. Except that somewhere inside that small lie, I learnt something much bigger.

I learnt that even a small difference between what I had achieved and what I was supposed to have achieved could disappoint my parents. And if that small difference mattered so much to them, perhaps I needed to make sure there were no differences at all.

So I worked harder.

I wanted to be the student who could safely be introduced to relatives without anyone needing to edit the story afterwards. I wanted the four As. I wanted the praise. I wanted the relief that came from knowing that nobody had to explain why I had not achieved what I was supposed to achieve. Somewhere along the way, however, achievement and self-worth became entangled. I did not necessarily become ambitious in the sense of knowing what I wanted to do with my life. I became ambitious in the sense of wanting to prove that I was good enough.

Those are two very different things.

And perhaps that is where I have become a little uncomfortable with the way we sometimes talk to children about aspirations. We often tell children that they need an ambition because ambition gives them direction. There is certainly truth in that. Research into children's and adolescents' career development shows that ideas about the future can influence motivation, educational choices and the careers young people eventually consider. Albert Bandura and his colleagues, for example, found that children's beliefs in their own capabilities were important in shaping their academic aspirations and the occupational possibilities they seriously considered. In other words, being able to imagine a future self is not useless. It can help a young person decide what is worth working towards. (Bandura, Barbaranelli, Caprara & Pastorelli, 2001.)

The idea goes even further. Psychologists Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius introduced the concept of “possible selves” to describe the different versions of ourselves that we imagine in the future: who we hope to become, who we think we might become and even who we are afraid of becoming. They described possible selves as “specific, individually significant hopes, fears, and fantasies” that connect our sense of identity to our future behaviour. (Markus & Nurius, 1986.)

That makes sense to me.

A child who says, “I want to be a teacher,” may not actually be making a ten-year career plan. The child may simply be saying, “I like explaining things to people.” A child who says, “I want to be a doctor,” may not understand the years of medical training involved. Perhaps what they are really expressing is, “I want to help people.” Another child may say they want to be an artist because they like drawing, or a footballer because they love playing football. These are not necessarily career decisions. They are possibilities. And perhaps we should allow children to have possibilities without immediately turning them into plans.

Career-development research actually gives us good reason to do so. Children's aspirations develop as their understanding of themselves and the world changes. One study of more than 7,800 children in England found that only 8.6 per cent consistently expressed science-related career aspirations at both age 11 and age 14. Meanwhile, 15.7 per cent moved towards science-related aspirations and 12.2 per cent moved away from them. That is quite a lot of changing one's mind in just three years. (Sheldrake, 2020.)

Another longitudinal study examining students from childhood through adolescence found different trajectories in career aspirations rather than one neat developmental path. Some young people maintained relatively high aspirations, some changed direction and some lowered or raised their aspirations over time.

So when we ask an eight-year-old what they want to become, perhaps the more useful question is not, “What is your ambition?” Perhaps it is, “What are you curious about?” There is a subtle difference. An ambition asks for a destination. Curiosity asks us to keep walking. And children need both, but I am increasingly convinced that curiosity should come first.

There is another reason I say this. An aspiration only becomes healthy when it belongs, at least to some extent, to the person who holds it.

Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, through Self-Determination Theory, have spent decades examining motivation and human development. Their work identifies three basic psychological needs that support healthy motivation: autonomy, competence and relatedness. Autonomy is particularly relevant here. Young people need to experience themselves as having some ownership over their actions rather than simply feeling that they are carrying out someone else's instructions. Research applying Self-Determination Theory in education has found that supporting students' autonomy, competence and relationships is associated with stronger self-regulation, engagement, learning and wellbeing. (Deci & Ryan, 1994; Niemiec & Ryan, 2009.)

This is where I think adults can accidentally confuse aspiration with control. We might tell a child, “You need to have an ambition.” But what the child hears might be, “You need to know what kind of person you are going to become.” And then the next question becomes, “Is that ambition good enough?” Is being a teacher ambitious enough? Is being a nurse ambitious enough? Is wanting to be a stay-at-home parent ambitious enough? Is wanting to be happy ambitious enough?

The moment aspiration becomes a measurement of worth, it stops being a compass and becomes a scoreboard. And I know something about scoreboards. I spent a considerable part of my childhood trying to make sure the score beside my name was good enough.

Research on parental expectations and perfectionism helps explain why this can become complicated. A 2017 study involving school-aged children found that parental expectations were associated with self-oriented perfectionistic striving, while parental criticism was associated with a more self-critical form of perfectionism that was linked to negative affect. (Stoeber et al., 2017.)

More recently, research examining young people's perceptions of parental expectations and criticism found associations between these pressures and different forms of perfectionism. Psychologist Thomas Curran has warned that when expectations become excessive, young people can internalise them and begin to depend on achievement for their self-esteem. As Curran put it, “Young people internalize those expectations and depend on them for their self-esteem.” He is careful to point out that such research shows correlation rather than proving that parental expectations directly cause perfectionism, but the relationship is significant enough to deserve our attention.

That sentence makes me think about the child I once was. I did not necessarily become someone who knew exactly what he wanted to become. I became someone who knew exactly what he did not want to be: a disappointment. And those are not the same thing.

There is a difference between being motivated by the desire to become something and being motivated by the fear of not being enough. The first can expand a child. The second can make a child very efficient at performing. And performance can look remarkably similar to ambition from the outside.

That is perhaps why I am wary when adults proudly say that a child is “very ambitious” because the child studies constantly, collects achievements, joins competitions, takes additional classes and is always trying to be the best.

Maybe the child is ambitious. Or maybe the child has simply learnt that being impressive is the safest way to be loved.

We should not assume that every high-achieving child is unhappy, of course. Nor should we romanticise a lack of ambition. Children need challenge. They need to experience competence. They need opportunities to discover what they are good at and what they enjoy. Parents and teachers should absolutely encourage them to stretch themselves.

But encouragement is not the same thing as scripting.

There is a Malay saying, “Di mana ada kemahuan, di situ ada jalan” — where there is a will, there is a way. I like the saying, but I sometimes wonder whether we have become too interested in deciding the destination before asking whether the child has discovered what they actually want. Because perhaps the first question should not be, “Where do you want to go?” Perhaps it should be, “What makes you want to move?”

There is another Malay saying, “Jauh perjalanan, luas pengalaman.” The further the journey, the wider the experience. I find this one particularly comforting when thinking about young people. It suggests that we do not necessarily discover ourselves by sitting still and deciding everything in advance. Sometimes we discover ourselves by travelling. We try something. We fail. We meet someone. We learn something. We realise that we are good at something we never expected. We discover that something we once loved is no longer interesting to us.

And then we change direction. That is not failure. That is growing up.

Even aspirations expressed during adolescence are not necessarily permanent. Research following adolescents has found that career aspirations can be reasonably stable in some periods, while other studies have found considerable change, particularly as young people acquire new information about themselves, education and the world of work. A longitudinal study of young people in China, for instance, found that while some adolescents maintained consistently high educational aspirations, many others experienced upward or downward changes between ages 11 and 15.

Perhaps the problem is that adults love a straight line. Childhood. School. University. Career. Success.

But human beings rarely develop in straight lines.

Even the young people of Singapore are telling us that their pathways are not necessarily linear. The National Youth Council's Youth Study on Transitions and Evolving Pathways in Singapore, conducted with the Institute of Policy Studies Social Lab, followed young people aged 17 to 24 between 2017 and 2022 specifically to understand their “life evolving aspirations, values & attitudes, and achievements & mobility” as they moved through adolescence into adulthood. The very name of the study is telling: evolving pathways.

We use the word “pathway” because we like to imagine that there is somewhere the path is leading. But a pathway can have bends. It can have forks. Sometimes it can even lead you somewhere you did not intend to go, and you discover that you quite like the place. I think that is something we should tell young people more often. You are allowed to change your mind. You are allowed to discover that the thing you thought you wanted at 12 is not what you want at 18. You are allowed to realise that the career your parents thought was perfect for you is not the life you want. You are allowed to have an aspiration and then outgrow it. You are allowed to have no idea yet. And perhaps most importantly, you are allowed to be happy while you are figuring it out.

This last part matters to me because we sometimes speak about happiness as though it is something young people earn after they have achieved enough. Do well in school first. Get into the right course. Get the right qualifications. Find the right career. Earn enough money. Then you can be happy.

But why should happiness always be waiting at the end of the corridor?

Research into Singaporean families has also highlighted the tension between children's academic success and emotional wellbeing. A 2024 ethnographic study by sociologist Kristina Göransson examined Singaporean middle-class families who were wrestling with precisely this tension: wanting their children to succeed while also wanting them to experience a happier, less stressful childhood.

Perhaps we have made childhood too much about preparing for adulthood. Sometimes I wonder whether we are so concerned about what a child will become that we forget to ask who the child is today. Is the child kind? Is the child curious? Does the child know how to make a friend? Can the child recover from making a mistake? Can the child laugh at himself? Can the child say, “I don't know”? Can the child try something without immediately worrying whether it will look impressive on a résumé? Can the child experience being ordinary without feeling inadequate? Those things may not appear on a career-planning worksheet, but they are not insignificant. They are part of becoming a person.

And perhaps this is where I have changed my mind about what Miss Tan Lily was trying to tell us all those years ago. I do not think she was wrong. Having a sense of direction can be useful. Having something to work towards can motivate us. Being able to imagine a future version of ourselves can help us make decisions in the present. But perhaps ambition does not have to mean choosing a profession. Perhaps aspiration can be much smaller and much more human. A child can aspire to become someone who is brave enough to speak up. A teenager can aspire to become more independent. A young person can aspire to find work that is meaningful. Someone can aspire to make enough money to support their family. Someone else can aspire to have enough time to care for the people they love. Someone can aspire to create art. Someone can aspire to help others. Someone can aspire to live quietly. Someone can aspire simply to become a person they can respect. These are aspirations too. And they leave room for change.

Carol Dweck has a phrase that I find useful here: “Becoming is better than being.” Interestingly, Dweck herself has explained that the phrase predates her and that it was not originally coined by her. But I think the reason it resonates with her work is that “becoming” leaves room for movement. It suggests that we do not necessarily have to arrive at a fixed understanding of who we are before we can begin living our lives. We can grow into things, discover things about ourselves along the way and, perhaps most importantly, change our minds without treating that change as some sort of personal failure.

I think this is particularly important when we talk about aspirations with children. A child who says that they want to become a writer does not necessarily need to know what kind of writer they want to be, just as a child who dreams of becoming a teacher does not need to understand what teaching will eventually demand of them. Even adults rarely have that kind of certainty. We enter professions thinking we know what they will give us, only to discover that the work changes us in ways we could not have anticipated. Sometimes we discover that the thing we thought we wanted was only a stepping stone towards something else. Sometimes we discover that we were wrong altogether. There should be nothing particularly frightening about that. It is simply part of growing up.

Perhaps, then, what we should give children is not necessarily a fixed destination, but enough space to discover their own direction. We can encourage them to take their interests seriously without insisting that those interests must immediately become careers. We can expose them to different possibilities without making every possibility into an expectation. Most importantly, we can allow them to change their minds without making them feel that they have somehow wasted the time they spent wanting something else.

When I look back at the primary school child who had no ambition, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if someone had simply told me that it was perfectly acceptable not to know. I might still have worked hard. I might still have wanted to do well in school. Eventually, I might still have found my way into theatre, education and writing, although I suspect the journey would have taken just as many strange detours as it eventually did. But perhaps I would have carried those achievements differently. Perhaps I would have understood earlier that doing well was something I had accomplished rather than something I needed to accomplish in order to prove that I was worthy.

Perhaps that is the distinction I wish I had understood when I was younger. Getting three As and one B did not mean that I had failed to become the person I was supposed to be. It simply meant that, on that particular occasion, I had received three As and one B. The B did not need to be quietly promoted to an A in conversations with relatives for me to remain worthy of being celebrated. It certainly did not need to become evidence that I had somehow fallen short as a person.

And perhaps this is what I would like to say to young people this Youth Day. If you already know what you want to pursue, there is nothing wrong with being excited about it. Take that interest seriously, learn more about it and see where it takes you. But if you are still unsure, I hope you do not mistake uncertainty for a lack of ambition. There is a great deal of growing that happens before we know what we want, and sometimes there is an even greater amount of growing that happens after we think we already know.

Perhaps you do not need to have your entire life mapped out while you are still in school. You might discover an interest because a teacher introduced you to something unexpected. You might meet someone whose work opens your eyes to a possibility you had never considered. You might fail at something and discover that failure has taught you more about yourself than success ever did. Or you might simply grow older and realise that the person you wanted to become at fifteen is not the person you want to become at twenty-five. None of these necessarily mean that you have lost your way. Sometimes they are precisely how we find it.

 

Written by: Adi Jamaludin