But seriously, how many kids have more than a surface level knowledge of what various occupations do, or even what occupations were available? How many have practical dreams like becoming an accountant? There were adults in my programming class that became disillusioned with the career path when they discovered it wasn't all about manipulating green scrolling text like the matrix. My 13 year old nephew went through this stuff but has had a change of heart after discovering Architecture was a math intensive profession.

They simply don't have the depth and breadth of understanding to be specializing at that age.

What they have to do at this age is discover as much of the world as possible in order to be able to make a better choice later on.

That is only one job in one niche industry. I'm trying to figure out how to expose my children to a volume of careers that extend beyond programmer, fireman, astronaut, etc.

For some reason (probably upbringing and local environment), some people start to think about their careers very late. And I don't feel like thinking about it much earlier is productive. When you're 15, or 9, you don't really have enough information (or arguably sapience), to make a reasoned choice.

I feel the "compound interest everything" thinking is infecting our lives too much. I've heard arguments that Soviet times were bad because it was government that told you where to go to work, and free societies let people choose for themselves. But if kids are forced to think about their career at 9 and make decisions that become binding because of sunk costs, that's essentially market choosing for you. You're not free either way, it's just a different optimization system optimizing you.

In some ways that must be quite freeing, assuming that the selection is reasonably correlated with your abilities and temperament.

People change a lot since that age ;)