For parents

Why “what’s your plan?” is the wrong question

By Teague Bode · June 11, 2026 · 6 min read

You ask your high school junior or senior what they’re going to do after graduation. You get a shrug. Or a vague “I’m figuring it out.” Or a flash of irritation that ends the conversation before it starts. Then the calendar moves another week and nothing has changed.

If that’s the pattern in your house, here’s something I’ve learned from 25 years leading young soldiers and a decade teaching teenagers: the silence usually isn’t avoidance. The question is just too big to answer cold.

“I don’t know” is how a teen ends the quiz — not the conversation about the future

“What’s your plan?” lands like a pop quiz they’re failing in front of someone whose opinion matters more than anyone’s. There’s no good answer in the moment, so they reach for the one that makes the quiz stop: “I don’t know.”

Most teens aren’t lazy. They’re capable and unsure — which is a completely reasonable thing to be at 17, facing the biggest decision of their life so far with almost no practice making decisions that size. They don’t need more pressure. They need a better on-ramp.

Ask for evidence, not plans

Instead of “what do you want to do with your life,” try this: “Tell me about a time you were completely locked in on something. What were you doing?”

Strengths are facts a teen can actually talk about — the shift they covered when a coworker quit, the project they stayed up too late on because they wanted to, the way they’re the one friends call when something breaks. The future is a guess they can’t talk about yet. Start with the facts, and a direction tends to surface on its own.

Tell your own winding road — and skip the moral

Sometime this week, in the car or at dinner, tell your teen your real career story. What you wanted at 17. Your first paycheck job. The turn you didn’t see coming. What you’d tell your younger self.

One rule: no moral at the end. The second it becomes “…and that’s why you should,” they stop listening. Teens quietly believe every adult had a plan that worked out. Finding out the truth — that good lives get built through detours and adjustments — is what makes planning feel possible instead of terrifying.

Put four real paths on the table, with equal respect

College, the trades, service, and going straight to work or starting something are all real roads to a good life. The trick is to compare them with the same honest questions, not to rank them by prestige:

What does it cost to enter? How long until a real paycheck? What does an ordinary Tuesday actually look like? And — the one most families skip — how reversible is it? That last question is the pressure-release valve. Almost every first move can be adjusted later, which means choosing a direction isn’t the life sentence it feels like at 17.

What a real plan actually looks like

Not a vision board. Not “go to college and figure it out there.” A real plan fits on one page: three strengths backed by evidence, a chosen path, a backup with a trigger date, and six months of action steps with real dates on them. Something a teen can put on the refrigerator and explain to their grandmother without flinching.

You can absolutely build that at your own kitchen table — the three questions above are the start of it. Some families would rather hand the structure to someone outside the house, which is the whole reason this work exists.

— Teague Bode is a retired U.S. Army Command Sergeant Major, a high school teacher and coach, and the founder of The Pathfinder Project in Northwest Florida.