Future proof your child

Life skills to teach now

How are your crystal ballgazing skills? Because a huge chunk of parenting is making choices for your children now that you hope will be right for a future you can only imagine, and try to predict. Parents of children born in the US in the 1980s believed that they should teach their children Japanese – incorrectly predicting the next world superpower. As the Washington Post notes in a 2012 article, the US intelligence community’s first ever Global Trends report in 1997 failed to anticipate almost every major political development of the subsequent 15 years, including the 2008 global economic crisis.

So, while taking each prediction with a shovel of salt,

let’s nevertheless try to imagine what the world of work and play will look like in 2030 – as well has how we can respond as parents to best prepare our children for this world.

LIFE SKILLS FOR THE FUTURE

In their 2008 book, Future-proof Your Child, authors Nikki Bush and Graeme Codrington claim that “the important ‘talent X-factors’ for developing exceptional young people include teaching our children: to break conventions, to be resilient, to learn, to know themselves, to relate to others.” Parents are the repositories of most learning for children: schools can impart a selection of the world’s “overwhelming” trove of information – and are great for socialisation, the authors argue, but only the great schools teach lessons – as do parents, by “spending time in conversation with and modelling to our children”.

ALL ABOUT FLEXIBILITY

BREAK CONVENTIONS We are trying to predict the skills our children will need for an unknown future, so perhaps one of the most useful skills to give our children is the ability to cope with uncertainty, or rapid change. Bush and Codrington argue that “we know for certain that we don’t know what the world will be like when our children grow up.” What we do know, however, is that the rate of change humans experience keeps increasing. The authors say the Information Age (in which we currently live) is distinguished by the intensity of the pace of change; it’s a game changer, much as the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution once were. “The number of new things we are expected to master is exploding,” they say, and while we cannot teach (yet

unknown) information, facts or data, we can teach our children the skills with which to cope with change.

TECHNOLOGY BITES

BE RESILIENT That we are in the Information Age, or the Age of Technology, is a given. We need to respond as parents by cultivating a familiarity with tech, as well as an appreciation of its dangers. We should teach our children to become tech consumers as well as tech creators, is how Bush and Codrington put it – to be able to manipulate technology, sure, but also to be able to understand it (even if only a little bit). Excellent junior coding apps are now available for children as young as four – browse around the app store on your ipad.

We all know we must talk to our children about stranger danger, but online safety requires its own chat. Our children need to know the implications – some lifelong, some affecting their future careers – of posting personal information and images online. They need to know about online sexual predators and how to avoid them, as well as the trauma they may experience by clicking on that ill-advised link and not being able to “unsee” what they’ve chosen to view.

We must additionally arm ourselves with the ability to monitor and restrict our children’s online behaviour. Age appropriate screen time limits are recommended by the American Pediatric Association for a reason. Set parental

controls on your browsers, and control your household’s passwords for access to tech.

Lastly, our understanding of good manners evolves and etiquette changes for each generation, but people still have the same need to be treated as they would like to be treated themselves. Whether your child is conducting business meetings online or thanking Grandma for her gift via SMS, it’s worth trying to inculcate the basic human value of respecting the message, whatever the medium.

CREATIVITY RULES

NEVER STOP LEARNING The Institute for Futures Research at the University of Stellenbosch examines the social, political, technological and ecological trends that

shape our future workplaces. “Today we have access to more information than ever before, but we must find ways to transform data into knowledge and even wisdom,” says the Institute’s director, professor Andre Roux. “We now need people who can interpret information. More and more jobs will be done by computers and robots. While this will replace people, it will also force people to be more creative than before.” As online shopping explodes, and 3D printing and mechanisation increases daily, even routine jobs may soon become work that requires imaginative application.

Any disruptive technology destroys while it innovates – think of horse-drawn coaches becoming obsolete as motor cars were invented. “Creative destruction of this sort means the world will need innovative people who can adapt technology in new ways,” says prof Roux. Bear in mind that technology also relies on people to make and use it – an aeroplane, he explains, still remains useless without its pilot (for now...).

A NEW WORKPLACE KNOWING THEMSELVES

“We think the next generation will demand that their work is filled with purpose and meaning, emphasising partnerships and networks instead of hierarchies,” says prof Roux. Workers will still need a good quality education and general knowledge of the arts and sciences, but social skills are becoming increasingly important in the age of connectedness. “The idea of ‘8-5-for-40’ (years) is going to change,” he says. In the massively expanding informal sector, many of our children will be entrepreneurs or work freelance or irregularly. “Small business accounts for 70 percent of production in the US,” says Roux. He adds that the idea of our children retiring at 65 is “absurd”, citing massively increasing life expectancy as the first reason. “The average age at which Japanese children become orphans is 67,” he says. “And in Europe today there are more people older than 65 than there are children.” And these 65-year-olds are energetic, thanks to medical advances, meaning “we will work longer but differently.”

All of this has a major impact on how our children experience the world as adults. “We already know of Generation Y that, while they appear individualistic, they are concerned about the environment and value ethical companies who try to minimise their environmental impact. That will continue with our children,” believes prof Roux.

“Trust is the new currency,” agree Bush and Codrington. “The connection economy has customers who demand – faced with arrays of choice for similar products – ethical practices or other non-intrinsic brand values. Customers want experiences and relationships, not just products and transactions.”

GLOBAL CITIZENS

RELATING TO OTHERS “The world is becoming ever more integrated,” says prof Roux. “There will soon be eight billion people in the global village.” We tend to think of families separated by emigration as particular to a few countries (like SA). But, says Codrington, “it’s highly likely that parents from all around the world will live in different geographies to their children in the future. Just 20 years ago, only four percent of the world’s population lived and worked outside the land of their birth. That number is now closer to 15 percent and rising. This is not just due to migration, but also to the increase in multinational companies and foreign work placements.” “I think it will become entirely normal to have both inward and outward migration on a significant scale,” he adds. “In this environment, parents have the responsibility to prepare their children to be global citizens, with global skills.” So learn a new language with your child. Explore other cultures together. And teach yourself to be au fait with communications technologies, such as Skype and Facebook, that help people who love each other straddle continents.

If these predictions seem vague yet overwhelming, remember that while the world is changing, children still have the same basic needs. “In particular, the first seven years are highly miraculous,” say Bush and Codrington. There is a good chance we could get all our future-gazing wrong. But as long as we have properly loved and nurtured our little charges, chances are they’ll manage in their brave new world all by themselves very well indeed. YB