When They Should Think About Where to Land

So how young is too young?

For career planning, I mean.

Kindergarten? Let's not force the budding doctors to stay inside the lines of their anatomy-lesson-inspired coloring books just yet.

College graduation? Well, that's probably a little late to introduce the concept.

But what about those years in between? Is there anything parents, grandparents and involved aunts and uncles really should be doing to help the kids they love find their life's work? Can books such as "What Color Is Your Parachute for Teens" play a helpful role in a teen's development, or do they just create unnecessary pressure and tension?

The more I read of books such as "What Color Is Your Parachute for Teens," an adaptation of a classic career-advice guide for adults, the more I lean toward the latter.

I don't think this career-planning push comes from a bad impulse on adults' part. Often we just want to spare the kids in our lives the flailing around we did in our own youth. If somehow they could just figure this stuff out earlier, we think, they would make better choices.

But you can't figure yourself out early. It's impossible. So resist the urge to try to force the issue. We should at least let kids reach their full adult heights before we expect them to make decisions that would be best made by fully adult brains.

Young people should be allowed to explore their interests for the sake of exploring their interests, not to get a head start in the working world. Teens should be able to choose paid jobs and volunteer work fairly casually, not for the impact these activities will have on their résumés. Yes, the working world is competitive these days, but that doesn't mean people benefit much if they start worrying about CVs and internships at 12 instead of 18.

Besides the unnecessary pressure, there's also the danger that the push to plan could backfire. Some of the most distraught e-mails I get from twenty- and thirtysomething readers come from people who committed themselves to a career path early on and then didn't know what to do with themselves when it didn't work out. Some don't have the skills to pursue a particular path, such as medical school. Others just burned out after spending a decade or more fretting about a job. Half the time, they spent just a year or two actually doing the work. It seems just thinking about it all the time was enough to wear them out.

The truth is, most of us these days change our majors several times in college, change careers several times in our twenties, and change careers a few more times before we retire. It's completely routine for people to hit age 40, 50 or 60 and still not have found their professional niche, or to be in pursuit of a new one. No amount of planning and premature decision-making when you're still picking candy out of your braces can circumvent this process of self-discovery.

And no amount of fill-in-the-bubble testing can get around it, either. Teens' outlook on life and perception of themselves is still very much in flux -- not to mention often grossly inaccurate. That makes the results of such tests meaningless. (The No. 1 suggestion when I took those tests as a 15-year-old: movie director. Anyone who has seen my attempts even at still photography would recognize this is absurd. Peers with whom I've discussed this issue report similarly disparate results. None is in the line of work suggested by those guidance-counselor-administered tests.) Of course, I don't think all discussions of work life are problematic. Job shadowing, for instance, can be both fun and useful, especially for older teens. But it's important that such activities be at the teen's own initiative. Adults can offer guidance -- pointers about office manners and dress codes can help young people make a good impression in such meetings -- but they shouldn't try to run the show.

In other words, let's let "What do you want to be when you grow up?" remain an invitation to dream, not an order to plan.

Early Choosers

How old were you when you started thinking about what you wanted to do for a living? How do those early ideas relate to what you wound up doing? If you're willing to share your story for a follow-up column on the subject, e-mail me at slayterme@washpost.com . Please include your full name and daytime phone number.

Join Mary Ellen Slayter for Career Track Live, an online discussion of issues affecting young workers, at 2 p.m. tomorrow athttp://www.washingtonpost.com.