How to futureproof your kids
HOW to futureproof your kids to survive in the digital revolution.
IN the first of our six-part series in this special issue, we look at the dramatic changes in tomorrow’s workplace, and how parents must learn the secret to fostering two key ingredients their children will need: resilience and adaptability.
PART ONE: THE EARLY YEARS
Words: Harry de Quetteville
OUR job of future-proofing our children begins where we all begin – in the womb. Oxford University anthropologist Anna Machin has surveyed parental bonds around the world, in humans and in other species, and has made what at first sight seems to be a curious discovery – that a secure, loving relationship between parents and children allows offspring to wander away, to become independent.
True emotional attachment, oddly, allows children to detach themselves earlier, to be autonomous, creative individuals. In extreme cases, where such bonds are combined with exposure to risk, toddlers of just three and four can seem almost preternaturally assured and mature – an effect Machin has noticed among children in Congolese tribes who are allowed to play with fire and knives from an early age.
Your appetite for risk may not be quite so high. But in talking to dozens of experts for this piece, “resilience” has been the word that cropped up most often. To face the wildly uncertain future, our children will need not just academic qualifications but, above all, emotional and mental flexibility and resilience. And the best way to foster that, Machin says, is to work hard, and consciously, on the bond you have with your child, as soon as possible, even if it feels strange.
“Work at it from day one,” she says. “The safer your child feels in your relationship and love, the more confidence and self-esteem they will have to go out and face the world. If they feel secure, strongly tethered, it allows them to sail out into the storm, knowing they can pull back into port if they begin to sink.”
Once that bond is established, it’s time to start working on how your children learn. British psychologist Tali Sharot, mother of a three- and five-year-old, conducted an interesting experiment on one of her own children. She placed a range of objects in front of her daughter when she was only a few months old. Of these objects, the baby reached repeatedly for the iPhone. Yet she had no way to activate the phone, no use for it, no understanding of what it did. So why go for that? Sharot concluded that it was because the baby noted the importance of this device to her mother and instinctively deduced that it would also be valuable to her.
“If you want to improve your child, then work on yourself,” says Sonia Livingstone, Professor of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics and author of Parenting for a Digital Future. “You are the big example. From healthy lifestyle to which way you vote, we parents are the single biggest explanation of our children’s behaviour.”
Early years, Sharot insists, are the time to focus not on specific skills but on traits. “With grit and optimism you are more likely to succeed, wherever you are,” she says. “Emphasising these things is something you see in schools more and more than in the past.”
Indeed, with greater academic rigour now in the state school system, it is here that time and resource-rich private schools will increasingly seek to promote and differentiate themselves. Pay our fees, they will say, not just for great grades (which you may be able to find for free elsewhere) but also for sporting, networking and artistic opportunities to build what’s now commonly called “social capital” (which you will not).
All this is part of the “EQ not IQ” movement – a recognition that as machines and computers increasingly perform rational, repeatable elements of our work, skilled and unskilled, from data entry to medical diagnosis, it is creativity and emotional intelligence that will set human beings apart.
When parents talk of “tomorrow’s core skills” and inevitably mention STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), or coding, or Mandarin, what they should be thinking about, from a very young age, is adaptability and resilience. “That’s where the emphasis [in education] increasingly is now – or should be,” says Sharot.
CUT THE CORD, EMBRACE THE FUTURE
FOR middle-class parents – willing and able to leverage advantage to plot and micromanage children’s routes to success – the importance of resilience ought to serve as something of a warning. We have to stop doing everything for them – stop the endless stimuli so they are never bored and never have to work out what to do next for themselves; stop hovering so they never graze their knees if they fall; resist the urge to leap in and guide them to the right answers. Instead, let them play games of their own devising and let them fail – repeatedly.
The weirdness of this is that the focus on generically human traits such as grit and optimism comes at a time when the world is becoming ever more specific, more personalised. If your child “hates numbers” today, you may well let her bin maths as soon as she is allowed. But in future, playful apps tailored to the ways she learns – which note where she struggles and respond better, more individually, than any hard-pressed teacher – may re-open avenues of learning once closed.
Basic online learning platforms exist already. In future, the main role of teachers could well be to help children find their own bespoke methods of learning. Their jobs will not be the pure transmission of facts.
We already live in a world where each of us carries the world’s knowledge in our pockets, on our internet-enabled smartphones. That wealth of knowledge, accessible as never before, will only grow richer, more available. Homo sapiens owned the past. Robots may eventually own the future, or at least run so much of it that humans are liberated – or doomed, depending on your outlook – to live without the nine-to-five. For the next few decades, we will work together.
“The smart money is on human-AI partnership,” says Dr Ian Pearson, a former engineer from Belfast, Northern Ireland, who turned his talent for analysing how systems plug together to become a “futurologist”, focusing on the interaction between social and technological trends. “In the short and medium term there’s a big advantage in being human,” Pearson says. “From nursing to policing, from teaching to HR, in every aspect of business leadership, you now have to have good personal and emotional skills to bond with and lead other people.”
Those skills will come to dominate as AI levels the playing field on the IQ side. As research from Google – a company that initially hired only brilliant computer scientists – revealed in January this year, the seven top characteristics of its most successful employees were soft skills: coaching, listening well, and making connections with others to solve complex problems. Raw STEM ability came last.
The figures are dramatic. Deloitte recently analysed more than 350 careers and found that the number of jobs available in 160 of them is declining. In the 205 where job numbers were found to be increasing, it noted “softer, transferable skills” were more prominent.
Occupations requiring a higher level of skills such as active listening, complex problem-solving and the ability to exercise judgment have seen a net increase of 1.9 million jobs between 2001 and 2016. These skills are only going to become more important as AI and robotics become rooted in the workplace.
PREPARE FOR THE UNKNOWN
AS technology marches forward, the established phases of human life – education, higher education, career, retirement – are likely to blend and merge. That will be exciting, and also unsettling. Instead of a career for life, those in school now are predicted to have had 10 different jobs by the time they are 40. Chances are they’ll be freelancers, picking up tasks outsourced by companies across the globe, managing their own financial affairs beyond the safety blanket of the monthly pay cheque.
We cannot see around the corner. Still, the indicators are powerful: there will be jobs for our children. The ever-stronger partnership between man and machine will lead to better jobs, shorn of dull routine – and yet, less routine will mean more uncertainty.
Our principal role as parents today is to prepare our children for that uncertainty. To foster in them the drive and resilience – mental and physical – for a world in which bespoke solutions to boost their talents will exist, if they are determined to seek them out.
Once, we knew the markers of success: a high ATAR in Year 12, top marks at university, and an establishment profession. Now the markers are very different, and the greatest challenge for parents who grew up under the old system may be to believe and accept that.
If the old ways are disappearing, though, the new are not baffling. They are driven by technology and complexity, but they are not technological and complex. To prosper in the new age, our children must not behave like robots. They must not learn like robots. Nor work like robots. The real robots will do all that. To prosper in the new age, nothing will be more important than being human.
WE NEED TO ADAPT
Advertiser journalist Jessica Galletly talks about a new mum’s hopes and fears for her son Jackson, born on July 18.
Q: YOUR SON COULD WELL LIVE UNTIL THE NEXT CENTURY – WHAT ARE YOUR HOPES FOR HIM?
A: I remember looking at Jackson a couple of days after his birth and feeling overwhelmed with a need to protect him. I did everything I could while I was pregnant to give him a good start – ate all the right foods, exercised, meditated. I even played music to him a couple of times. Now I was looking down at this little, perfect face in the big outside world, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to shield him from pain or disappointment for the rest of his life. It’s a scary thought!
At the core of it all, I hope my son will live in a world where he feels free to be whoever and whatever he wants. A world where there is less prejudice against sexual orientation and race, and a world in which he feels safe. I hope he finds a passion to pursue and that there are plentiful opportunities for employment; that he is able to save for a house or travel, and that he can play football or dance or write or do whatever his heart desires, and be happy.
Q: HOW PREPARED ARE PARENTS TODAY FOR THE PACE OF SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGE?
A: I think the best parents can do for their children is to be open to change. I remember asking my mum whether she would vote “yes” in the same sex marriage campaign, not knowing whether her religion or Italian upbringing would influence her opinion – and her answer was a resounding, “of course”. I was proud that it wasn’t just my generation that was passionate about the issue. I have no idea what the economic landscape will look like, but I expect it to be quite different to what it is now. Does that mean I’m unprepared? I’m not sure.
Q: WHEN YOU LOOK AT YOUR OWN CHILDHOOD, WHAT ARE THE BIG DIFFERENCES TODAY?
A: Technology shapes the way we live. I remember going into dad’s study as a child and waiting patiently for the dial-up modem to connect to the internet. Now I’m part of a generation that doesn’t like to wait for anything. I can check tomorrow’s weather instantly on my phone – no need to wait for tonight’s forecast on TV. I can breastfeed Jackson while shopping for clothes online, watch The Block while checking emails and download a song while still listening to it on the radio.
School is different – and not just in an academic sense. Online bullying and the pressures of social media aren’t things I had to deal with.
There is greater awareness now of discrimination; we’re fighting against domestic violence, and we’re more conscious of the environment – though there is much room for improvement. It’s easier and more affordable to travel now than when I was young. Jobs have changed and the way we spend money has evolved.
Q: INCREASINGLY, YOUNGER KIDS ARE BEING GIVEN SCREEN TIME. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS?
A: I hate it. I can’t go to family dinner without my niece and nephew sitting on their tablet or parent’s phone. I guess it may be similar to the way my parents felt about television, but I feel like children are given so much screen time these days that it’s making them reclusive. It’s an addiction. Who knows the kind of effect it’s going to have on children’s brains and eyes and necks, let alone their mental health. And it concerns me that children are vulnerable to bullying outside of the schoolyard and the pressures of social media from such a young age. That’s probably my biggest fear as a new parent… the effects of the smart phone and social media.
Q: THE TALK TODAY IS ABOUT PEOPLE HAVING MULTIPLE CAREERS AND LIFETIME LEARNING – DO OUR SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES NEED TO CHANGE?
A: I think schools have been operating on an archaic model for too long. The subjects and methods of learning are too narrow and don’t equip students with practical tools to succeed in modern day industries. I think schools can set a better foundation by catering to different learning styles and adapting subjects to apply to modern day situations. Both schools and universities need to be clear on what jobs are available and make the learning relevant. Universities should offer short progressive courses for people who want multiple careers – and courses need to be affordable. Importantly, I believe both schools and universities need to place a bigger focus on interpersonal skills that transcend industry.
THE EARLY YEARS
ONE of the first big decisions parents must make arrives before their children are even born. At the 20-week scan, with a dollop of ultrasound jelly on a pregnant belly, there will come that moment when the doctor looks up at you and says the words, “Do you want to know?”
Some of us do. Some of us don’t. Sometimes couples are divided on the matter. But here is an amazing thing: increasing numbers don’t think it’s very important. Boy or girl? Some people no longer think this is even a valid question to ask. From the very start, then, parents these days are confronted by the dizzying pace at which the world is changing – not just technologically, but socially too. It can feel baffling. For most of us, gender will have been one of life’s great determinants – for good and ill. Yet for many teens and young adults of 2018, gender is an unimportant construct, both prescriptive and proscriptive, which the enlightened are finally finding a way to ditch. And gender is just one of many areas where parents can feel outflanked and outwitted by the pace of change.
We all know about the rise of artificial intelligence, but how will that manifest itself? What will genomics, robotics, virtual reality do to our world? What will they do to our children?
Look around you – the present is tangible. Project yourself into the future, and a world of limitless possibilities is also clear. But which of those possibilities will come to pass in the lifetime of our kids,
and how to prepare them, is the great unknown. There is no template for this.
What about education? What subjects should our children be learning, at primary school and later at university, if they should go to university at all? How can we ensure they are happy through these years and beyond? Is gender fluidity, for example, a fad, which we will look back on with astonishment in a generation’s time? Or is it the latest marker of humanity’s progress? What about their physical health, in an age where headlines about childhood obesity and poor juvenile diet abound? Does it even matter if a child grows up unhealthy if the healthcare of the future is able to undo the damage? And, finally, how can we guide our offspring to
a financially “healthy” adulthood, considering how hard it is for today’s twenty-somethings to buy property or even shift their five-figure student debts?
Such questions merely underscore the sheer diversity of potential futures for which today’s parents must prepare their children. Yet pause, breathe, and reassure yourselves. Some trends are clear, and they point to practical steps you can take. Hopefully you will find not just questions but also answers here.
PART 2: EARLY LESSONS
Words: Harry de Quetteville
IN TUNE WITH TOMORROW
When it comes to education, there’s only so much time. Is it better to enrol your children in music lessons, a language, coding – or just leave them to play with each other?
ON a glorious early summer’s day this year, I had breakfast with a senior executive from one of the world’s digital behemoths. We nibbled croissants and discussed the way the future might pan out, particularly the fact that more and more of us are using our voices to control our computers.
The pace of change is so startling, he said, that voice commands will soon overtake the keyboard as our main method of interacting with the web. In a matter of years, in other words, man will principally be talking to machine.
Stop for a second and think about what that means. In the past few years, voice recognition technology (using computational methods called “deep neural networks” or DNNs) has improved so much that it is now highly reliable, can understand accents and languages, and has such a thorough semantic understanding of the world that it can deduce what you mean even if you do not express yourself perfectly as you speak.
Couple this with the increasing proficiency of algorithmic language translation and it leads to a dramatic conclusion: if you are now learning a language to communicate in a purely functional, impersonal way, then you are expending a lot of effort on something that is soon likely to be redundant.
EQ v IQ
WHILE researching this series, I conducted an informal “futureproofing” survey, putting to the experts – from consultant doctors to computer scientists – a series of binary questions that articulated some of the conundrums today’s parents face.
The first was “Mandarin or mandolin?” – by which I meant, given the pace of technological change, will it stand your child in better stead to learn a language or an instrument?
Perhaps because of what they know about the kind of advances that the digital executive described to me, most of the experts plumped for the mandolin. “Multi-language translation is getting better and better,” said the AI-expert Mark Minevich, himself father to an eight-year-old girl, as he explained his decision.
This is the big lesson for parents now helping their children navigate educational choices: as artificial intelligence and robotics have an ever greater impact on our lives, emphasise the social, emotional, empathetic and creative skills that are particularly human.
That can mean learning Mandarin or mandolin – but try to focus on what you do with those skills. Learn Mandarin to chat with others, and because acquiring languages is a great general brain trainer, not because of your haphazard guesstimations about future geopolitics. Lean towards the mandolin (also a great brain trainer) if there is an orchestra at school.
Picking winners – specific subjects to learn now based on predicted technological change – is hard, because of what is known to some experts, tongue-in-cheek, as “the ketchup curve” of that change. Just as with automated translation, tech companies push, push, push for years and get nothing, then suddenly advance comes in a big splodge. Inevitably, trying to surf the curve can be messy.
What is undeniable is that, happily, access to information is becoming more equal. Sponge-like learning, once championed by schools which excelled in the discipline, is fast becoming out of date.
“Most IQ related skills are being automated at a high rate,” says futurologist Ian Pearson. “The guy who did no work at the back of the class will have the same access to information as the swot at the front. Instead, get children to focus on social skills – EQ not IQ. Of course, there’s still a value in education, for personal fulfilment, but the most economically important stuff children learn at school these days is on the playground: how to deal with bullies, how to please others, and how to like others. More of that should be going on in the classroom.”
PLAYING AT GROWING UP
HERE we encounter the importance of play. When to begin academic instruction is a debate that has been raging for decades. But given the almost unprecedented uncertainties of the decades ahead, the benefits of play at kindergarten and beyond are harder than ever to ignore.
“Research suggests the ‘benefits’ of introducing more academic curricula at an early age is not convincing,” says Dr Tomas Ellegaard, from The Centre for Research in Early Childhood Education and Care in Denmark, where schooling doesn’t begin until the age of six.
“The idea, now broadly shared internationally, is that allowing children to play, and leaving space for their interaction, to learn how to learn, is beneficial. We are preparing for a particularly contingent world, and one of the best ways to futureproof children against it is to play. I would certainly encourage small children to have play-based learning at an early age. Indeed there is a lot of research that suggests if you want a more academic child, start academia later. That’s one of the riddles of education.”
Researchers like Ellegaard believe that play is the best way for children to work out answers for themselves, to gain problem-solving competence. One of the main barriers, however, is us parents. We just won’t let our children play on their own.
“We compared interviews with parents made 18 years ago to those from 2016,” Ellegaard says. “What we found was that parents have become much more anxious about their children. They want them to have everything. In 2016, parents were obsessed with the wellbeing of their children.”
That obsession can be unhealthy. We hover. We leap in to point out answers to our offspring. And they are constantly stimulated. Most parents wonder and worry about screen time, and it is covered more fully in the sections here on mental and physical health, but the real screen time issue is the same for small as for older children: parents need to focus not just on what children are watching and for how long, but also think about the passivity of watching.
“Children are never bored,” says Jenny Afia, a lawyer who campaigns for social media companies to take greater responsibility towards young people, and a mother of two children, aged two and four. “Children are not engaging in role play. They are not having to make up games. No role play has a massive impact on long-term development because you don’t act out situations or create your own worlds.”
Never has there been a better time, then, to involve small children in the creative arts. To encourage hobbies of all sorts, even if interest in them is expressed only tentatively.
SIX TIPS FOR FUTUREPROOFING YOUR CHILD DURING THE EARLY YEARS
Words: Harry de Quetteville
1 LET THEM PLAY
Play means children working out answers for themselves, and learning to do so is the best way to prepare for the contingent world of tomorrow. Major studies even show that if you want a more academic child, it’s worth thinking about starting academic study later. In Denmark school begins at six.
2 TRAITS NOT SUBJECTS
Coding? Mandarin? Latin? You can’t pick the right subject to learn for tomorrow’s world. Instead, make whatever learning is done rigorous and stringent, and focus hard on character qualities: optimism, resilience and adaptability.
3 DON’T HOVER
Stamp on the temptation to solve your child’s problem for them. Able middle-class parents in particular suffer from this.
4 RISK-ON
Have you ever lost your child? Most of us have at one point. Ask yourself not how did you find them, but how did they get back to you? They need to be good judges of risk, and if you protect them from everything, they have no barometer of risk – crucial for the future.
5 CELEBRATE BOREDOM
Children today are constantly stimulated, never bored. They rarely engage in role play – but role play is crucial in working through situations and so in problem solving. Also, if our children are never left to their own devices, they will always be lonely when they are alone.
6 MACHINES ARE NOT THE ENEMY
The smart money is on human-AI partnership, not a replacement of man by machine. So don’t demonise or promote a Luddite world of zero screen time. The screens are colleagues of the future. Active or passive use is the key.
KEYS TO SUCCESS
WELCOME to a house filled with music. At five, Clay Rutland is learning piano and drums while his big brother, Indy, eight, learns piano, guitar and drums.
Their mother, Karen Rutland, runs her own music studio, Learning Through Music (LT Music) at Klemzig, and is convinced that mastering the basics helps with confidence, rhythm and even maths.
And if you are going to start anywhere, start with piano.
“I think out of all the instruments, it gives you all the benefits — the left and right-hand playing, it gets your brain thinking about your reading of the notes, and, for children, it’s a quick way of playing because you can just put your fingers on the keys,” Rutland says. “With a wind instrument, you have to learn how to blow before you can play it but piano is instant gratification.”
Both of her boys have already progressed to other instruments, and Indy was able to tackle guitar because he already understood the concept of music and could read notes and rhythms. Drums was just something he wanted to do and Clay has followed.
In an age of technology where children access smartphones, computers and iPads, Rutland believes learning music is incredibly important.
“They have to sit down and concentrate and work at it, they need to take the time and they need to practice,” she says. “It’s a discipline and they learn that practice makes perfect and they need to focus and once they can play a piece their self-confidence goes up.”
Because it isn’t technology-based, their imaginations are more easily inspired and it isn’t competitive; you learn at your own pace.
Most importantly, she says, music makes everyone feel good.
“No one comes out of a lesson who isn’t happy,” she says. “You can never sing a song and not be happy.”
The relationship between maths and music has been the subject of scientific studies because playing an instrument requires an understanding of concepts that are integral to maths, like patterns and fractions. There is strong anecdotal links between high maths achievers who are also musicians.
“Music is maths-related – it’s counting and rhythms, keeping in time, using both sides of the brain and it has been shown to help with reasoning skills,” Rutland says.
Her aim is to lay some groundwork that could surface in unexpected ways and she regrets that children learning music is rarer than it was.
“They may not end up being good musicians and that’s not why I put my kids into it,” she says. “It’s for all the other things they are going to gain from it, like social skills, learning how to organise themselves and practice.”
PART 3: JOBS OF TOMORROW
MASTERS OR APPRENTICE?
University was once the route to success. In the future, there will be myriad ways to a job that may change every few years. And one key to success will be a clean online reputation.
Words: Harry de Quetteville
HAS your child chosen what subjects to study? Booked his or her place at university? Are you, in the back of your mind, thinking about what kind of work would suit them, remembering how you, after a certain undergraduate haze, grabbed a degree and emerged to pursue a career that closely resembles – 20 or 30 years on – the job you are doing today?
Parents are marvellous social replicators. That’s the overwhelming conclusion of long-term child development studies. Middle-class parents by-and-large have successful middle-class children. But there’s a problem with that, as some replication is now bad. When it comes to higher education and the world of work, for example, yesterday’s models are no longer fit for purpose. The linear progression from school to universities to careers is being torn up. There are now myriad ways into top jobs, some of which don’t involve going to university at all.
Meanwhile, education is becoming a lifelong process. The top students today have the choice between a university degree leaving them with $50,000 of HECS debt or an apprenticeship leaving them with $50,000 in the bank and a three-year career head start. Many have no difficulty opting for the latter.
It is parents in their 40s and 50s who struggle to convince themselves. For they are part of a generation encouraged at all costs to go to university. A quarter of a century ago, only 65 per cent of children above the age of 16 were in full-time education. Today, 86 per cent are. Today, only 5 per cent of 16- and 17-year-olds have jobs. Two decades ago, it was 20 per cent. The difference is that a generation ago, children who didn’t stay in school after 16 were unlikely to go back to education later in life. And that was a barrier to high-profile, high-prestige, high-earning jobs. No longer. For children now, work might begin at 18, pause at 25 while they do a Masters, and resume at 29. And their working lives are likely to be composites of a dozen or more different jobs.
Increasingly, those jobs will find them. With each day that passes, technology allows companies to outsource more work to freelancers. Company computer systems are housed not on physical hard drives in offices, but remotely, on “the cloud” – allowing them to be accessed from anywhere by people who might be employees for years, or only a day.
There is every reason to believe that the gig economy, which we currently associate with Uber drivers or Deliveroo cyclists, will extend ever more widely. Competition for that economy’s work, then, will become infinitely broader. And when companies choose their freelancers, data will lead them to the people with the highest competencies for a task, rather than the people who went to a certain school. Sexual and racial discrimination should become less prevalent – but there will be downsides. For example, that picture on Facebook of your son, mindlessly drunk after his graduation party, wearing only stockings and a suspender belt, will not bolster his case for competence.
You might have heard terrifying stories about life in China, where “social credit” scores can dictate individuals’ ability to catch a flight, book a hotel room, or get a loan. Forget to pay a bill on time, down goes your score. Keep a healthy savings account balance, watch it go up.
This may sound like a dystopia. In China, there are certainly nightmarish elements to the system; making disobliging comments about the Communist Party online is no way to improve your rating. But if the thought control aspects of “social credit” will hopefully not transfer to these shores, reputational impact certainly will. In some ways it already has.
Uber drivers, for example, rate their customers, just as you rate them. If your score as a customer dips too low, you may find it hard to get a ride.
Similarly, if your children’s online reputation drops too low in future, they may find it hard to get work in a world where smart analytics tools will allow employers to scrutinise online information about them that is increasingly searchable. Experts today talk about creating a strong personal digital brand and then, above all, its “hygiene”.
“Think very carefully now about your child’s digital future and footprint,” says Sonia Livingstone, professor of social psychology at London’s School of Economics. “I might even say think very hard about taking pictures of your kids and putting them online. Because once you have had them facially recognised, that’s it. You can’t undo it.”
This is a crucial issue for parents today, she says, because legislation to protect consumer rights online is likely within a decade. “Before that kicks in, we are living in a curious moment of unregulated madness in which the innovation is running far ahead of the tech.” She likens a dodgy digital footprint today to a tattoo – permanent, and something most parents would rather their children didn’t have. “Get your child to 18 without a problematic digital record, then it’s down to them. I used to say that about tattoos. I would get my children to 18 without a tattoo. Because a digital marker is like a tattoo – something you can do instantly that is with you forever. We’ve never lived in a world where there’s been such a record.”
SCREENS FOR SCHOOLS
OF course, nothing is straightforward. At the same moment experts like Livingstone caution young people about using digital tools in their social lives, others are encouraging them to immerse themselves in digital possibilities in their academic lives. For parents of those teens at school now, the solution is clear.
Make home the place you learn with tech. Technology will allow parents to find apps and online platforms where learning can be tailored to particular ways their children acquire knowledge. The partnership between kids and tech is essential because by the time today’s schoolchildren start their first jobs, work will be a place where man and machine work side-by-side. Parents should think about fostering a mindset strong in “computational thinking”. This does not mean thinking “like a computer”, but rather thinking about a problem in ways that allow computers to help solve it. Typically, this means breaking problems down into components and thinking creatively, logically and often collaboratively about how to tackle each one.
Just as parents once had to decide whether to push their children towards top universities, they will in future have to decide whether to push them towards an entrepreneurial future. Whether they should become a “maker”. According to New York-based AI expert Mark Minevich, this is the key decision that influences what and how to study. “If you are going to be a user, a consumer of stuff, then it’s a good idea to be a generalist, to have a broad range to appreciate and interpret. But if you are going to be a creator, if you are going to build stuff, specialise. Be as expert as you can.”
All of which requires parents to step back and ask themselves what future will suit their child best. That hasn’t changed. What has is the number of different routes to that future.
“When I grew up, a traditional education was seen as the safe and the right thing to do,” says Julie Mercer, UK head of education research at Deloitte. “But it’s very important that now we are parents, we are willing to accept new routes into employment.”
The consequences for universities are likely to be profound. Already, many are making unconditional offers, and lowering offer grades to ensure student numbers (and accompanying fees) are sufficiently high.
Even futurologist Ian Pearson struggles to see how the current higher education model can be sustained in the future. “It’s hard to see what will happen to universities,” he says. “For a small number of people, deep knowledge learning will be appropriate. But we may go back to the situation we had 30 years ago where only 10 per cent of school-leavers go.”
SEVEN TIPS FOR FUTURE-PROOFING YOUR TEENAGER’S EDUCATION
1 DIGITAL FOOTPRINT
Chinese-style “social credit scores” are coming, in one form or another. They could influence your child’s ability to book a hotel room or secure a mortgage. So think carefully now about your child’s digital footprint. Once it’s out there, it’s out there forever.
2 ACCEPT THE NEW IN EDUCATION
Even if you went to university, your child’s best route to happiness and a good job may lie in an apprenticeship. Be flexible about routes from education into work.
3 FIND THE TAILORED WAY
From medicine to education, personalisation will be the keyword in future. Don’t say “she hates maths”, say “she hates learning maths like this”. Apps and online platforms will offer tailored solutions.
4 QUALITY NOT QUANTITY
Consider insisting your school sets fewer exams and spend the extra time on building social capital – say, by getting children to read about current events, debate them among themselves and with invited guests. It’s exams plus social capital that will secure those jobs requiring the highest cognitive skills.
5 DEMAND DIGITAL
Ask your school how it is developing your child’s digital skills. The future will be about working with computers.
6 HIT THE SWEET SPOT
Future-proofed careers will marry human creativity and computing power, like graphic designers and architects. Harness your imagination, then use tech to express it.
7 BE BOLD
The lesson for parents is clear – an education that is traditional and safe today may be risky and niche tomorrow.
CORE VALUES
‘I look at my kids and I can’t remember my life without them at all, and I can’t imagine a life without them in it at all.”
For architect and artist Paul Fairweather, 59, becoming a father (a little later in life than many) to Nicholas, 12, and Camille, 9, has profoundly changed the way he views the world. It has brought him deep love, immense pride, renewed wonder, and a real sense of the fleeting nature of time.
Married to Kara, 47, a boutique owner, Paul says the time with his two children “seems to be going by so quickly”, and he is well aware the teenage years are nearly upon his family.
But despite the relentless march of technology (Paul’s decided to go with the flow, learning how to play Fortnite with his son) and predictions of rapidly changing career opportunities, he believes that the importance of core values and personal skills remains the same. “I hope that Kara and I are teaching them to have a real sense of self, and of personal responsibility, so that they have clarity in what direction they want to go,” he says.
“I believe that is what will serve them best, whether they go into business or university or pursue a more creative path.”
The Fairweathers, who live, work and play in New Farm, in Brisbane’s inner north, are also aware that, as their children grow older, social media may encroach upon their family life.
“I think what we will be working on is for them not to lose their sense of self within that digital world,” Paul says.
But if their kids – as kids do – falter either online, or off, Paul and Kara are also guiding their children towards coping with tough times.
“I hope my kids don’t have too much trouble. I hope their hearts don’t get broken too badly – but, if they do, I want to teach them that it just becomes a part of them, it doesn’t define them. I want them to see that they can learn, take responsibility, and move on.”
PART 4: FUTURE OF MONEY
CASHLESS KIDS ON THE CARDS
Bitcoin, blockchain and cashless transactions: the world of money is more complex than ever before. Does a $5 note as pocket money cut it today? And how do you teach kids about the “appreciation economy”?
WORDS: HARRY DE QUETTEVILLE
There is a famous cartoon called Calvin and Hobbes. Its hero, Calvin, is a six-year-old boy. In one strip, his father announces, hands on hips: “Calvin, your mother and I have decided to give you an allowance.” Looking pleased at this act of parental care and maturity, he continues smugly: “It’s important that one learns the value of money.”
Calvin, snaffling the proffered coin, turns away, hunches over monstrously and rubs his hands together. “MONEY!!! HA HA HA!! I’M RICH. I CAN BUY OFF ANYBODY. THE WORLD IS MINE!!” At which his father turns and calls down the hall: “I blew it again, dear.”
Most parents can probably remember playing Calvin’s part in their youth – that intoxicating moment when money, from being something for grown-ups only, a totem of their power and your own powerlessness, becomes something for you too to spend. In my case, the only question then was how fast I could get to the toy shop.
But now that we are playing the part of Calvin’s hard-pressed father, how do we arrange financial matters with our children so that we too don’t have to call out “I blew it again, dear”?
It can feel harder than ever. Cash, in one form or another, has been around for thousands of years. Yet just at the point when we are having to teach the nippers about money, easy-to-understand coins and notes are fast disappearing. The cashless society is upon us, and more, crypto currencies and tokens have arrived as stores of value.
They can seem baffling and, as stories of wild swings in price and dodgy dealing abound, even unsavoury. Yet there are those who would bet their bottom dollar that Bitcoin and the like will become the cash of the future.
So, how do we prepare our children financially for a world where it’s not even clear how the finances will work? And once you have done that, how do you go about building them a sum to give them a head start in life?
DO YOU ALLOW POCKET MONEY OR POCKET AN ALLOWANCE?
“Numeracy will always be critical,” says Russell Winnard, from Young Money, which provides resources and training to anyone teaching young people how to manage money. “And coins and notes can help there, from as young as four.”
Typically, children at that age will attribute the greatest value to the biggest things – making 50¢ worth more than a $2. Once you have established recognition, you can proceed to games. “Give them a selection of small change and ask: ‘How do you make up $1 with the coins you have?’”
That is primary school level stuff. Winnard suggests that it’s critical to begin then, because if you do, he says, children should be able to grasp the concepts involved in insurance, inflation, compound interest and mortgages by the time they reach their late teens.
Such concepts are increasingly important because, with increasing lifespans, the impact of time on savings and pensions is growing in importance. “If you understand compound interest,” says Winnard, “you will be more tempted to start saving into your super earlier”.
But how to accompany growing theoretical awareness with a practical, cash-in-hand pocket money strategy at home?
First, accept early on that it might not be best to hand over cash, or call it pocket money. Sure, for young children, cash is still a useful method of communicating value – but while the number of cash transactions remains high, the amounts involved are getting smaller and smaller. As they graduate to saving and spending more, our children, like the rest of us, will go digital.
For some parents, the idea of handing over a card – with its associations of credit – to their adolescent children sounds worrying. But in fact cards can be used and controlled in ever more flexible ways, often through mobile phone apps. Parents can charge up cards with an allowance, then see precisely where that money is being spent, decide whether it can be used at ATMs or not, even what times of day children can spend with it.
Meanwhile, children can receive SMS balance alerts on their screen, so they know when their resources are running low. The point at which to introduce non-cash money depends on when you feel confident your children have fully grasped the concept of cashless.
“With cashless, younger people are not understanding what’s happening in transactions,” says Winnard. “Cashback in supermarkets is a very odd concept for them – you get the shopping and cash, too. As things get more cashless it’s important to explain to your children what’s going on.”
Once they’ve got it, begin to introduce ideas not just of spending, but of saving too. This is where the idea of an “allowance” rather than “pocket money” comes in. The latter all too often feels like the harvest of the magic money tree, a fruit which can be consumed without responsibility, on the assumption that more will appear in due course.
Clint Wilson, the founder of ParentPay, used to give his daughter Amber $5 pocket money “but it was almost as if she felt she had to spend it the day she got it”.
Substituting pocket money with an “allowance” changed that, says Wilson. Instead of the money purely being a treat, it became a way for Amber to take over little bits of the household budget. Instead of buying his daughters cinema tickets, for example, Wilson transfers the money to their cards.
Then they might see that different screenings at different times cost different amounts and, because the money is theirs, act accordingly. “They begin to think about budgeting,” he says. “And once they think about budgeting, they can think about saving.”
A particularly good way of encouraging this good habit, says Wilson, is to think of something they really want, then set a target for how much they have to save before you top up the rest. In this way, you help them take responsibility for saving towards big-ticket items – such as games consoles – which otherwise might only be the stuff of the special parental money trees that burst into flower at Christmas and birthdays.
TURNING DATA INTO CASH
There may be an important lesson here for parents of children growing up watching famous people making oodles of money apparently for doing nothing. The Instagram or YouTube celebrity, it might be worth pointing out to them, is actually running a business. And running it hard, because the competition in what is called the “appreciation economy” is relentless.
For every Kylie Jenner, a 20-year-old branch on the Kardashian celeb-tree whose make-up brand values her at a cool $US900 million ($A1.232 billion) there are countless, countless others selling nothing to their paltry 110 followers on Instagram (Jenner has 113 million!).
So, parents, talk about money with your children. Don’t make it a mystery or a taboo. Help them learn. Because if you don’t, then they might not help you learn. And you are going to need their help, come the fintech revolution. It is a revolution that is already seeing increasing use of digital tokens – like loyalty card points or air miles – that can be accrued and spent on the high street.
Meanwhile, blockchain technology promises us currencies that will bypass central banks entirely. Indeed, the very notion of government-backed “fiat currencies” like sterling or US dollars is already being challenged. Are you ready for that? It might very well be your children who, pausing only briefly to sigh, patiently explain to you just what is happening.
“Frankly, parents don’t need to know how it works,” says Wilson of cryptocurrencies. “What parents should start to do is appreciate that in the future there will be other forms of value transfer – of money – of which cryptocurrencies will probably be one. Much as they might want to, parents can’t just bury their heads in the sand and say ‘I don’t like it.’”
SAVING FOR THEIR FUTURE
Of course, the ultimate value you need to communicate to your children is not financial at all. “Don’t think you have to provide everything for them,” says Anna Sofat, founder of the financial adviser Addidi Wealth. “Give them skills before money. Less money and more time with them might be a far better investment.”
But if you want to put some money aside for your children to come into when they turn 18, there is, she says, a sensible way to do it. For a start, you don’t have to be too ambitious.
“Five or six thousand dollars is already a massive headstart,” she says. It could help with a car, or a deposit on a rental flat. She advises aiming for $10-15k if you plan to give it to your child at 18, and perhaps $25-30k if you want them to have it at 21. We’ve seen some really lovely sums being built up where people just stick away $50 a month,” says Sofat.
And coming into a pension at 18, she adds, might even encourage your children to continue investing in it themselves. If you do manage to stick something away for the progeny, remember to tell them about it. Nothing is more likely to see them blow it than springing $30k on them on their 21st birthday. Instead, from their teens, go over their annual statements with them, so they can see where their money is invested, and how it has gone up or down in value. Prepare them, be open, but don’t make it a burdensome thing, because the last lesson of money is that it is only a means to an end.
FIVE TIPS TO FUTUREPROOF YOUR CHILDREN’S FINANCIAL HEALTH
1 MONEY TALKS
Have open conversations about money with your kids. The concept of cashback can be confusing for very young children at the supermarket. Make sure they understand what is really happening in that transaction.
2 PENSION PLANNING
If you want to put some money aside for them, put a third of it in a pension, and encourage them to continue contributing from the age of 18.
3 NEST EGG
If you do manage to save a lump sum, show your children the annual statements and discuss plans for that money.
4 ALLOWANCE NOT POCKET MONEY
Pocket money is binge money. Allowance encourages responsibility.
5 CASH IS NOT KING
While cash transactions wither, digital information, like personal data, has real world value which increasingly may be exchanged through tokens or cryptocurrencies. Sound baffling? It’s not hard. Think of these tokens as alternative stores of value, like air miles.
RAKING IN THE MONEY
WORDS: MICHAEL MCGUIRE
THE real value in giving kids pocket money – or an “allowance” – is that it teaches them skills that are invaluable later in life.
Financial planner Darren James is director of MBA Financial Strategists and with wife Linda has two children, 10-year-old Kalan and Lyla who is eight.
James says the trick is to make sure children understand money is something to be earned, that it’s not just given away.
“The fact is, you have to lead by example,” he says. “The only place they learn to manage money is from the parents.
“I am very strong believer in getting them to do things for a tangible benefit.”
The philosophy in the James’ household is that the kids do a few small jobs during the week – maybe washing the dishes a few times – and receive $5 or $10 in recompense. So when they go and spend that money, the children are calculating just how much work they had to do to buy this thing. It gives the act of buying something more value – “as opposed to just going, ‘well there’s another $10, it doesn’t matter so much.’”.
James understands we are increasingly heading towards a cashless society, but “because I am
old-fashioned, I think getting them used to the cash part to start with is not a bad thing”.
“Purely because you can paypass and not really think about it. You just have to look at how many people ask for a receipt when they use a card. You lose track pretty easily of your spending patterns when you do that.”
But he says if parents want to go down the path of giving children a debit card (and never a credit card), they should look for apps that allow them to keep an eye on where and how the money is being spent.
James is also a fan of kids having their own bank accounts and making small, regular contributions to it. “Getting them used to putting that in there and seeing over time how
that builds up, just from adding little amounts, is a really good lesson,” he says.
“Getting that idea you don’t have to put large amounts away, you can just plug away and put small amounts away and it builds over time.”
Originally published in The Telegraph (UK) as How to Futureproof your Kids telegraph.co.uk/family/parenting-tips-futureproof-children-early-years/
© Harry de Quetteville / Telegraph Media Group Limited 2018