Parents want their children to reach their goals and be happy, but what if those goals are so wildly improbable that the parent starts quietly bracing for disappointment? Your five-year-old announces, with total conviction, that she’s going to be an astronaut. Your son informs you at dinner that he’s playing in the Super Bowl someday, cleats and all, despite currently struggling to make it down a soccer field without tripping over the ball. It’s tempting to gently redirect these declarations toward something more “realistic.” But developmental psychologists would tell you to hold off on that impulse. Researchers like Carol Dweck and Albert Bandura have shown that a child’s sense of self-efficacy — the belief that effort leads to mastery — is built less by the goal itself and more by how the adults around them respond to the pursuit of it. The dream is really just the delivery vehicle for something far more useful: motivation.

This is where the humor of childhood ambition earns its keep. Almost no one becomes an astronaut. Almost no one plays in the Super Bowl. Statistically, your child’s stated career goal is more likely to be struck by lightning than fulfilled literally — and yet, oddly, that’s not really the point. Erik Erikson’s stage theory of psychosocial development frames early-to-middle childhood as a period defined by “industry versus inferiority,” where children are working out whether effort actually produces competence. A kid obsessed with rockets is practicing curiosity, discipline, and tolerance for failure — the same muscles used by actual scientists, just aimed, for now, at a NASA-shaped target. A kid dreaming of touchdown passes is learning teamwork, physical resilience, and the sting of losing without quitting. The goal is a costume. The skills underneath it are real.