It was a small thing, really. The kind that happens in kitchens across Britain on ordinary Tuesday evenings when homework is spread across the table and parents are half-listening while preparing dinner.
My grandson Jamie, seven years old with perpetually untied shoelaces, was completing a school worksheet. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” the paper prompted in cheerful Comic Sans.
I watched over his shoulder as he carefully printed his answer: “A space explorer and an artist.”
The certainty in those pencil strokes stopped me. Not a trace of doubt or qualification. No “maybe” or “I think” or “possibly.” Just pure, unencumbered certainty.
I remembered my daughter at the same age, declaring with equal conviction that she would be a veterinarian who played violin in orchestras around the world.
By sixteen, she had abandoned both dreams for more “sensible” A-level choices. By twenty-three, she was working in marketing, telling herself this was just temporary until she found her “real” calling.
Somewhere between Jamie’s age and adulthood, we learn to temper our dreams with practicality. We begin qualifying them, apologising for them, eventually abandoning them altogether.
When exactly does that happen? When do we start punishing ourselves for the audacity of our own imagination?
The irony feels especially sharp when I consider how earnestly we encourage children to dream. “You can be anything,” we tell them, beaming with pride at their ambitious declarations. We buy them astronaut costumes and easels and doctor kits. We applaud their wild, improbable plans with genuine enthusiasm.
And then, almost imperceptibly, we begin the quiet work of dismantling those very dreams.
It starts innocently enough. “That sounds wonderful, darling, but perhaps you should also think about something to fall back on.” We introduce the concept of the backup plan before they’ve even mastered long division. We gently redirect: “Art is a lovely hobby, but what about something more stable?” We suggest amendments: “Space is fascinating — have you considered engineering instead?”
By the time they reach secondary school, most children have internalised our contradictory messaging. The wilder aspirations retreat into quiet corners, becoming private fantasies rather than declared intentions.
I’ve been guilty of this dampening myself. When my son announced at thirteen that he wanted to be a playwright, I heard myself asking, “Wouldn’t journalism be more secure?” When my daughter wavered between veterinary school and music, I subtly emphasised the former.
I believed I was being responsible. I thought I was protecting them from disappointment.
What I didn’t recognise then was how thoroughly I’d absorbed the economics of dreaming — the unspoken calculation that measures the value of aspiration against its probability of financial success. I had unwittingly become an accountant of ambition, tallying the costs of imagination and finding them too dear.
Now, watching Jamie’s unselfconscious certainty, I wonder about the cumulative cost of our well-intentioned pragmatism. What happens to a society that systematically teaches its children to distrust their own desires?
The evidence surrounds us. We see it in the quiet resignation of forty-somethings trapped in careers they never wanted. In the midlife crises that aren’t crises at all but belated rebellions against decades of compromise. In the regret that settles like dust on shelves of unused art supplies and unread textbooks. In the wistful way people speak of “what I would have done if…”
We’ve normalised this trajectory. We expect young people to abandon their wilder ambitions. We consider it a natural part of maturation, a necessary submission to reality. “Growing up” has become synonymous with narrowing one’s horizons rather than expanding them.
When I look back at my own life, I see the ghostly outlines of abandoned dreams. The photography studio I never opened. The novel I never wrote. The languages I never learned.
Not because these things were impossible, but because somewhere along the way, I absorbed the message that they weren’t sensible investments of my time and energy.
What would our lives look like if we hadn’t been taught to punish ourselves for dreaming? If we hadn’t learned to equate adulthood with the systematic culling of possibilities?
I don’t know if Jamie will become a space explorer and artist. The odds are against it, statistically speaking. But I’ve made a private vow not to be among those who chip away at his certainty. Not to be the voice that introduces doubt where now there is only clean, clear conviction.
Perhaps the kindest thing we can do for the children in our lives is to protect their capacity for unfettered dreaming for as long as possible. Not because every wild ambition will materialise exactly as imagined, but because the ability to envision expansive possibilities is itself a kind of freedom — one that, once lost, is extraordinarily difficult to reclaim.
And perhaps it’s not too late for ourselves, either. The dreams we set aside weren’t destroyed, merely deferred. They wait for us still, patient as seeds in frozen soil.
Last week, I bought myself a sketchbook. My hands are older now, less steady than they once were. The lines I draw aren’t as clean as I’d like.
But there’s something quietly revolutionary in the act itself — in reclaiming a dream I was taught to abandon decades ago.
Jamie watches me draw sometimes, his small fingers tracing the lines I make. “You’re an artist like me,” he says, with the same certainty he brings to all his declarations.
And in those moments, I almost believe him.
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