Parenting & Family Quote by Paula Poundstone

Poundstone turns a supposedly wholesome ritual into a quiet indictment of adulthood. The question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" is marketed as encouragement, but she frames it as extraction: adults aren’t nurturing kids’ dreams, they’re scavenging them. The joke works because it reverses the power dynamic. Kids are meant to be unfinished, searching. Adults are meant to have arrived. Poundstone suggests the opposite is closer to the truth.

The intent is classic stand-up mischief: take a socially approved script and expose the desperation inside it. The line lands on a sharp bit of cognitive dissonance: adults ask children to name a future identity as if a job title equals a self, then act surprised when grown-ups feel untethered. By making adults "looking for ideas", Poundstone implies a culture where the imagination window closes too early, where adulthood is less about stability than about managing quiet panic with polite conversation.

There’s also a critique of work-as-identity hiding in plain sight. The question reduces a child to a résumé-in-progress, and Poundstone’s punchline reveals why adults love it: it’s a safe way to flirt with reinvention without admitting dissatisfaction. In the late-20th-century American context Poundstone comes out of - a world of careerism, self-help, and constant upgrading - the joke doubles as social commentary. The kid gets asked to audition for the future; the adult gets to borrow the kid’s sense that the future is still negotiable.