My child wants to be a YouTuber. My reaction went through 5 stages.

My son told me he wanted to be a YouTuber at dinner on a Thursday in October. He said it the same way you'd say you wanted to be a doctor or an engineer — matter-of-factly, as if the decision had been made and he was simply informing us.

He is ten.

My husband looked at me. I looked at my son. A very specific process began in my head. I'm going to describe it honestly because I think it's the same process many Hong Kong parents go through, and nobody is honest about it.

Stage 1: Dismissal dressed as practical concern.

My first instinct was to explain, kindly, why this wasn't a realistic career. The market saturation. The income instability. The statistical improbability of success. I had facts. I was ready to deploy them. What I was actually doing was rerouting my immediate visceral rejection ("absolutely not, no, we didn't pay for the Mandarin classes for this") through a more respectable channel called "practical guidance."

He would have heard the rejection. Children always do.

Stage 2: Negotiation with the hierarchy of acceptable careers.

In stage 2, I did the thing where I offered alternatives that I hoped would serve the same emotional need but be more culturally acceptable. "What about media production? That's a real industry." "What about marketing?" "What about working in technology?" These suggestions had the specific quality of things said by a parent who is trying to be flexible while maintaining a firm grip on the steering wheel.

He looked at me with the patience of someone who was ten years old and already understood that this conversation was about me, not him.

Stage 3: Research.

I did what I do with all uncomfortable things: I turned it into a project. I looked up YouTuber income statistics. Hong Kong content creators. Successful local YouTubers. What equipment is needed. What skills are involved. I was telling myself I was gathering information. I was also looking for evidence that would support whichever conclusion I'd already reached.

What I actually found was more interesting than my premise. Content creation at scale is a legitimate profession with real skill requirements: video editing, scripting, audience analysis, distribution strategy, thumbnail optimisation, SEO. Young people who are good at it are developing skills that transfer to adjacent creative and media industries. The YouTuber who fails at YouTube and goes into marketing comes with demonstrable competence in digital communication that employers value.

This didn't fully resolve my discomfort, but it complicated my dismissal.

Stage 4: The uncomfortable question.

I asked myself: what is the actual fear? If I'm honest about it. Not the practical concerns, which can be addressed, but the fear underneath.

The fear is this: I have a specific picture of a successful life for my son. It involves markers I can explain at the family dinner — a school, a university, a profession, a salary. YouTube doesn't appear in that picture. My discomfort is partly about his real prospects and partly about my inability to translate his ambition into something I can present to my mother-in-law at Chinese New Year.

That is not a good basis for educational guidance.

Stage 5: Actual conversation.

Two weeks after the dinner, I asked him to show me his favourite channels. He did, with enthusiasm. We watched some videos. I asked questions: Why does this person's editing work? What makes this channel different from that one? Why do you think this video has more views than that one? He had opinions. Good ones. He'd been paying attention.

I told him that if he wanted to learn video editing, I would pay for a proper course. Not as a career track — he's ten, career tracks are not the point. But because learning to make something, structure a story, edit for an audience — these are real skills, and the fact that he'd identified them as interesting was worth following.

He is three months into a video editing class. He has made four short videos. They are not monetisable. They are genuinely watchable.

I don't know what he'll be at thirty. Neither does he. But he is learning to make things, and he has a parent who is trying, imperfectly, to follow rather than redirect.

That feels like progress.