“So, what do you do?”
This is a normal question to field when you meet anyone new.
It’s a social norm to lead with our job titles, as if our value is measured by a payslip or a LinkedIn headline. But to be fair, it certainly isn’t necessarily malicious. Asking “what do you do?” is often a way to find common ground, to start a conversation, to locate each other on the map of the world. But the problem isn’t the question itself; it’s what we’ve learned to attach to the answer, and how this effect has trickled on to the way our kids formulate their identities and relationships with success.
Many of us grew up in households, schools, and systems where identity and achievement were tightly bound. Success was something you earned by ticking the right boxes, not something you defined for yourself. And so we learned to hold our breath when answering that question at a dinner party, or to rehearse the “respectable” version of our work when meeting someone new. We learn to brace for the comparison, the subtle hierarchy, the way people light up if your job sounds impressive, or lose interest if it doesn’t. Sometimes, this isn’t the case. And sometimes, it is. Whichever it is, the undercurrent of attachment to our career identities, originating from ourselves, remains all the same.
If that’s the air we breathe as adults, it’s no surprise our children are absorbing it too: measuring their worth in grades, accolades, and achievements, long before they’ve had the chance to simply be.
A child’s job, in society’s eyes, is school. Their CV is their report card. Their “career trajectory” is their exam performance, tracked from the age of seven (or younger).
We don’t even notice how casually we reinforce this script.
“Good job, you got an A!”
“You need to try harder, or you’ll never get anywhere.”
“You’re so smart—you always get full marks.”
It’s the same structure of praise and pressure most adults hear at work: perform well, and you’re worthy. Miss the target, and your very self—one that’s only just beginning to develop—feels like it’s under question.
This isn’t only stressful. It’s identity-shaping in ways we rarely pause to examine. If a child learns that their grades are their identity, they’ll grow into adults who believe their careers are theirs. And when either one falters—as they inevitably do—they’re left wondering: who am I without this?
Jobs aren’t forever. Industries collapse, roles shift, and AI eats half the tasks we once trained for years to master. So, if your sense of worth is tethered to your title, what happens when the ground moves beneath you?
Grades are no different. Kids aren’t static learners. They stumble, bloom late, fail subjects they’ll never need, ace ones they’ll never use, and sometimes only find their rhythm years after the “critical” exams have passed.
But the trap that is collapsing grades and achievements into identity leaves little room for this reality, and is often a slippery slope. A bad grade feels like a bad self. Just as an adult losing a job can feel like losing the ground beneath their feet—understandably so in some ways.
But both are symptoms of the same illusion: that we are our performance. That our identity can be reduced to an external measure.
We often ask our kids the same empty question we get at dinner parties:
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
We challenge you to reflect on this for a moment to weigh the impact our words can have. Notice the wording: “be.” As if being an engineer or doctor or teacher or YouTuber is the same as being, period. But kids don’t think in terms of jobs. They think in play, in curiosity, in the things that make their eyes widen. They think in terms of who, not what. It’s adults who shrink those expansive selves into neat job descriptions.
Instead, we ask this at Imagine If:
“Who do you want to be when you grow up?”
“What kind of friend, community member, thinker, or dreamer do you want to be?”
“How do you want to use your days, your energy, your quirks?”
These questions decouple identity from performance, and they start giving kids the space to build a self that isn’t wholly dependent on their next grade.
The truth is, we understand that many parents struggle to loosen this grip, because we’re still living inside it ourselves. If you’ve ever felt gutted by a layoff, invisible at a dinner party without an impressive job title, or quietly resentful when someone asks, “So what do you do?”—you know the feeling. Our culture rewards performance—sometimes over anything else. And that culture bleeds into parenting.
So much of modern parenting anxiety isn’t about our kids at all. It’s about ourselves. If my child doesn’t get good grades, what does that say about me? If they don’t follow a respectable career path, will people think I failed as a parent? It’s the same pressure we grew up with—only now refracted through the lens of social media, WhatsApp school groups, etc.
The thing is: the more we parent from our own unresolved identity anxiety, the more we pass it down.
Decoupling jobs from identity isn’t just an adult project. It’s the same work we need to do for our kids with grades.
It starts small: celebrate effort, not just outcomes. Ask who they want to be, not what they want to be. Let them fail without letting it define them. Remind them (and yourself) that worth isn’t dictated by a scoreboard. And remember that these ideas are years and years of deep social conditioning we have to collectively, and painfully, extricate ourselves from.
Because if we can’t teach our kids to hold an identity that’s bigger than grades, we can’t expect them to grow into adults who can hold an identity bigger than jobs.
The world they’re entering will demand this flexibility. Titles will change, industries will vanish, but their sense of self—curiosity, kindness, grit, imagination—will be what endures.
Sometimes, we wait for someone to tell us it’s okay to detach. Or that it’s okay to stop equating grades with being brilliant, or jobs with your identity.
But no one’s coming. And the permission slip isn’t real.
The work of decoupling happens in the quiet, messy, unglamorous spaces of parenting and adulthood. It happens every time we resist the urge to ask about test scores, or every time we describe ourselves at a dinner party in a way that doesn’t start with a job title.
It’s undoubtedly hard. It feels like breaking an unspoken rule. But that’s how identity is reclaimed. Not handed down, but built.
So, we encourage you to start asking, and start reflecting on the important stuff, like: who are you becoming?
Because if we can raise children—and re-raise ourselves—to answer that question with honesty and depth, we’ll be raising a generation less likely to confuse their humanity with their résumé. And maybe then, when the jobs shift and the grades fade into dusty files, what remains won’t be anxiety, but something steadier: like a self that was never up for grading in the first place.