An excerpt from Thriving in the 21st Century:
“Do well in school so you can get into a good college and earn a degree, and you’ll always have a job with a good company, with steady pay and benefits.”
That’s what we, today’s parents, were told. The majority of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations worked for one company for many years, received substantial benefits and regular raises, and retired with pensions. It worked for them, so their advice became common wisdom. Our generation accepted this advice, and we’ve repeated it to our own children since they were small.
There’s just one problem. That advice made sense in the world our parents and grandparents grew up in, but that world is quickly disappearing. It makes no sense to pass along 20th century advice in the 21st century.
Let’s face it, times have changed.
For one thing, having a college degree is no longer a guarantee of anything. Plenty of new college graduates work at retail jobs making minimum wage because they can’t find a job in their field of study. There are also many adults with college degrees plus 20 or 30 years of work experience for whom unemployment has become a way of life because they cannot find any kind of work. (Meanwhile, degree-less people like Bill Gates of Microsoft become billionaires.)
To make matters worse, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, most of the 10 fastest-growing occupations with the highest job growth of the next decade will not even require a four-year degree. So much for the guaranteed employability offered by the college diploma.
How about working for a “good company”? These days it’s getting harder and harder to find a company that isn’t laying off workers, outsourcing work to private contractors, off-shoring work to other countries, being absorbed into a larger company thanks to a merger, or even shutting down.
Then there are those pensions our elders relied on. Over the past decade, some pension funds were raided and found empty while others greatly reduced what was originally promised to the retirees dependent upon them. Employer-funded pensions are becoming rare and worker-funded pensions (401(k)s, etc.) have become the norm. Even some pensions for state government employees, once considered a sure bet, are in financial danger after being invested in questionable hedge funds and other 21st century investment vehicles that have crashed and burned.
As for benefits, the cost of health insurance, once completely covered by the employer, is now increasingly paid for by the employee. The premiums employees pay are skyrocketing, yet pay raises are becoming rare. Overall, wages have stagnated since the 21st century began. In fact, pay cuts are making the news these days.
Yes, it’s a bleak picture I’m painting here, and a startling one for parents who assume that guiding their children toward a good and prosperous future simply requires them to pass on that same conventional wisdom:
“Do well in school so you can get into a good college and earn a degree, and you’ll always have a job with a good company, with steady pay and benefits.”
Given the current state of affairs, this statement sounds naïve and antiquated. Our elders told us to get the degree and the company would take care of us; that worked for a while. But now everything’s changed. We’re feeling our way along because we weren’t prepared for this. Jobs are no longer lifelong careers; in fact, they’re disappearing, and unemployment has reached scary highs. Our houses are dropping in value. If we manage to save anything, it earns almost no interest. Things are not going well economically for Americans these days.
Of course, the economy could turn around. It usually does, sooner or later. But that doesn’t mean that life will go back to the way it was before. Fundamental changes have occurred, thanks to technology and the global economy, that make the conventional wisdom dated, if not obsolete.
Still, the conventional wisdom is what we’ve been taught, and what our parents were taught. It continues to be the guiding principle of public and most private education in our country. If it’s wrong (in this book I will make the case that it is wrong, with one exception), what do we tell our kids now? How do we prepare our children to survive and even thrive in a 21st century world that’s completely different from what we’ve known?
The answers to these questions are found in this book. The idea for this book came to me several years ago, when my husband’s manufacturing-related business began to decline after many years of more work than he could handle. My desire to find the cause of the decline led me to learn (long before the media caught on) about the tremendous changes we’re just beginning to see in our country and all over the world. I realized that my husband and I had to prepare our four children for adulthood differently than we were prepared for it.
Over the course of my research, I learned that there are certain skills and mindsets that will particularly benefit our children as future adults of the 21st century. This book will describe seven of the most important ones (“Seven Strengths”) and explain how our children can acquire them.
Before we get into that, however, it will be helpful to take a brief look at how we got to where we are: what’s changed, what’s causing the changes, and what the solution is. You’ll find the answers to those questions in the first section. In Section 2, you’ll learn about the Seven Strengths our children will need and how they can obtain them. In Section 3, we’ll look at the most efficient way to help our children develop the Seven Strengths. In Section 4, we’ll discuss careers, college, and family businesses.
By the end of this book, I hope you’ll see that passing on conventional wisdom to our children because “that’s the way we’ve always done it” is not the way to go anymore. Instead, you’ll have discovered what has changed and how you can prepare your children to do well despite those changes.
We live in interesting times. The increased rate of technological change we’re experiencing is bringing about a new kind of economy. That’s why it’s crucial that we do what we can now to prepare our children to thrive in the 21st century.
Another excerpt from Thriving in the 21st Century:
from: Strength #1: Creativity and Innovation
Time
Free time was once the hallmark of childhood. But these days, many parents feel it’s their duty to keep their children busy. This mindset can be found in parents who both work outside the home and need somewhere for the kids to go during off-school hours, parents who compete with other parents regarding whose child is the most “well-rounded,” parents who want to give their children every “advantage,” and parents who believe their children will fall behind or get into trouble unless their schedules include every activity that can be crammed into each day.
The result is a generation of children who are so accustomed to organized activities that they don’t know how to entertain themselves (unless there’s a television or video game nearby). They’re the total opposite of the kind of workers needed to grow our economy in the future. America needs creative innovators, not passive participants or couch potatoes. So if you want to encourage your children’s natural creativity, reduce the amount of time they spend in scheduled activities, and give them more free time instead.
What is free time? It’s unstructured. It’s not directed by adults. It requires that children move through boredom in order to arrive at the place where the innate creativity of the child kicks in and comes up with something to do. Many parents dread the thought of free time for their children, because they know it will be a matter of moments before the “I’m Bored!” chorus begins.
If you have children whose time has always been planned out for them, they won’t know what to do with a lot of free time—at first. But if you stick to your guns and require them to entertain themselves on a daily basis, they will (perhaps out of desperation) figure it out. See “It’s OK for Children to Get Bored…Really!” (Appendix A, page 359) for more about this.
So what will they do with all their free time? They can make things and work with their hands. They can use their imaginations to come up with games, structures, even toys. In the absence of planned activities and formal schedules, children are incredibly good at learning from their play. They just need enough time to do so.
Children also need time to be alone so they can think. In this frantically scheduled world we live in, even adults find they don’t have time to just sit and think. But quiet introspection is important for everyone, young and old. It’s particularly important for those who create things. Much solitary thought is required for pursuits such as writing, painting, inventing, etc.
Free time isn’t only a necessity for small children; older children and teens need plenty of it, too. Many extremely creative people are late-bloomers (as Edison was). They need ample time alone as they grow older and discover what their gifts are, and how they want to use them. Unfortunately, parents and schools tend to increase the outside activities of teens just when they really need their personal time.
Tightly scheduled lives are detrimental to creativity. In 1996, Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile, an expert on creativity and business innovation, led a research project to study creativity in the workplace. Amabile and her team pored over almost 12,000 journal entries from over 200 people working on creative projects in a variety of different companies. One of their most important conclusions was that time pressure actually decreases creativity. While many people (myself included) feel that working against a deadline makes them more productive, it may not make them more creative. It takes time for creative ideas to grow and develop in our minds. The Amabile study found repeatedly that creative people on a tight time schedule found their creative abilities hampered not only up until their deadlines, but even for a few days afterward.
What this means for our children is that they need regular free time in order to feed the creativity and spirit of innovation they were born with. It takes time to get deeply involved in a creative pursuit; as parents, it’s up to us to make sure our children get that time.