The Trouble With Asking Teenagers What They’re Interested In

“What are you interested in?” is a perfectly good question. Most of us ask it of teenagers the way we ask adults what they do for work: as a way of being curious about a person. The answer deserves a real hearing.

The trouble starts with what we do next. We hear “basketball, anime, maybe something with computers” and treat the list as a map of the territory. Summer plans and electives, and our private sense of what this kid is “like,” all get organized around it. But the list is a record of what the teenager has met so far. A fourteen-year-old can tell you what they have tried and what they’re already decent at. They can’t tell you how they would feel about something they have never encountered, or about a field they met once, badly, on a day when they were lost in the first twenty minutes.

Interest is less often found than built: first with help from outside, later from within.

Doors that were never opened

Eben Upton ran into this problem from the admissions side. After he became director of studies in computing at St John’s College, Cambridge, he noticed that applications to study computer science were falling and that hardly any of the students who did arrive could program. He had grown up on a BBC Micro, and in an IEEE Spectrum profile he drew the contrast in six words: “Kids today don’t have that experience.” His answer was a very cheap computer, the Raspberry Pi, launched in 2012. He hoped about a thousand units would reach the right kids and thought ten thousand would be a great outcome. It sold far beyond those hopes, though by 2023 most of the units it sold were going to industrial and embedded customers rather than to the teenagers he had in mind. The diagnosis is the part worth keeping: a shortage of interested applicants can be a shortage of encounters.

Jennifer Doudna, who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, grew up in Hilo, Hawaii. In her Nobel autobiography she recalls that in sixth grade she came across The Double Helix, James Watson’s account of the discovery of DNA’s structure, which her father had laid on her bed. She was captivated, she writes, by how scientists working together had pieced together one of biology’s most elusive puzzles. Both stories turn on a specific, concrete thing put in front of a young person.

What the research does and doesn’t say

In 2018 the psychologists Paul O’Keefe, Carol Dweck and Gregory Walton published five studies on how people think about their own interests. Some people hold what the authors call a fixed theory: interests are inborn, and the task is to find yours. Others hold a growth theory: interests develop. People with stronger fixed theories were less interested in an article from outside their existing field. In two experiments the authors induced the belief in participants, which suggests the belief itself has an effect. In another, an engaging video about black holes was followed by a hard scientific article. Participants primed with a fixed theory lost more interest, as if the difficulty were evidence that the topic wasn’t really theirs. Walton told Stanford News that “you take some time to do it, you encounter challenges, over time you build that commitment.”

These were short experiments with small samples (from roughly 45 to 140 people each), mostly students and online participants, using articles and videos rather than a year of cello lessons. They show that the belief matters. Whether any particular parenting move produces a passion is untested.

Sport has a parallel. A 2021 meta-analysis by Arne Güllich and colleagues covered 51 studies and more than 6,000 athletes. World-class adult performers had, on average, started their main sport later than national-class peers and had done more coach-led practice in other sports as children. The authors are careful to say this is an association, and the reason for it isn’t settled. But it complicates the assumption that knowing early is the same as doing well.

Enjoyment often follows knowing how

Suppose a fourteen-year-old named Priya says electronics is boring. A relative hands her a dead bike light and a multimeter and spends ten minutes explaining what a circuit is and what the meter says about whether current can flow. She tests the battery, then the switch, and finds a corroded contact. She scrapes it clean and the light comes on. It dies again the next evening.

Half an hour of fixing hasn’t made Priya a hobbyist, and nobody should expect it to. What has changed is smaller. A thing she thought of as opaque has parts, and the parts can be tested. The light dying again annoys her more than it would have a week earlier, which is a kind of progress. The next broken object, a headphone cable, now looks like a problem rather than a wall. Where she goes from there’s open: she might take apart every cable in the house, or decide once was plenty. Either answer is useful information.

The order matters. Often the sequence runs from understanding to a first working attempt to a small success, and only then to caring. A questionnaire administered at the start would have recorded “not interested,” accurately, and told us almost nothing about where she could go.

Exposure has to become experience

A documentary or a career quiz can open a door. Neither substitutes for trying something and getting a response from the world. Curiosity is an opening. Sustained engagement needs a fair chance to learn enough to get somewhere. Direction comes later, as an informed sense of what pulls a person back.

Constant sampling doesn’t solve it either. A teenager who moves from one novelty to the next, never staying long enough for the confusing first stretch to clear, learns mostly that beginnings are pleasant. A fair trial has a shape: enough instruction that the confusion is survivable, a small result the teenager can see, and a boundary agreed in advance about when to decide.

The hard middle is several different problems

At some point in a fair trial a teenager will want out, and “I want to quit” hides at least four different sentences.

I can’t do this yet. That’s a request for teaching, practice or a smaller next step, and persistence often pays.

I don’t see why I’m doing this. That’s a request for a purpose. If a real connection to something the teenager cares about turns up, the work changes character. If none does, letting go is reasonable.

This just isn’t me. After a real attempt, that conclusion deserves respect. Finding out what you don’t want is an actual result.

This costs more than it’s worth. Time, equipment, money and energy are legitimate limits, and the right response may be to rescope the commitment rather than abandon it.

Quitting at the first friction and persisting forever are both ways of not listening. The skill is knowing which sentence you’re hearing, and a parent can ask the question that sorts them: “Is it that you can’t yet, or that you don’t want to?”

“Plenty of teenagers already know what they love”

They do, and nothing here argues against it. A teenager with a spontaneous, durable interest should be fed generously, and that interest can run deeper than anything an adult could assign. Two things still follow. An early interest is a place to begin, and it can change; the same fixed-interest belief that narrows a curious teenager can make a committed one fragile when the work gets hard. And a teenager who can’t name a passion isn’t behind. “I don’t know” reflects how much they have been exposed to.

What a parent can offer

The useful role is closer to offering than prescribing. Put one unfamiliar, worthwhile thing within reach and ask whether the teenager wants to try it. Support a reasonable first attempt, then step back and let the teenager decide what happens next. The offer has to be something they can decline, and a first attempt works better when it’s not graded, scheduled into a résumé or announced to relatives as a new identity.

Replace “What’s your passion?” with a question that does more work: “What’s something you haven’t had a fair chance to try?” The word fair carries most of the weight, because it admits that a first impression is a weak measurement.

Several fair tests produce something more useful than a passion label. A teenager may discover not “I want to be an engineer” but “I like figuring out why things fail,” or “I like persuading people more than building things.” That’s information a seventeen-year-old can actually plan around, and it only becomes visible after the teenager has tried enough things to see a pattern.