Comment by m-i-l

Children will only say they want to be things they are exposed to and understand. Looking at the list for nowadays, it still includes teachers, athletes and musicians, which they see in the media and might be able to imagine themselves doing. It doesn't include things like lawyers and computer programmers, which aren't careers children are particularly aware of, and even if they were they wouldn't fully appreciate. So the story here is simply that astronauts aren't in the media as much as they were during the Space Race and Cold War. Don't think it is anything to worry about - they'll probably change their minds by the time they grow up anyway. And who knows, by the time they grow up there might be new careers that we can't even imagine these days (I can pretty much guarantee that almost no-one would have imagined jobs like "social media influencer" and "machine learning data cleanser" when I was young).