On parenting in the digital age
Sign of the times, last week as i passed what used to be a cute decoration shop for kids on Helmotzplatz in Berlin, i realised it had been replaced by a coding school for young girls. After a bit of research, i learned the program uses a star-shaped mini-computer going by the name of Calliope to teach young girls the basics of programming, as part of an initiative funded by the german government to reduce the gender gap in technology.
As a mum of a 2.5 year old girl myself, education in the digital age is a topic that’s on my mind a lot and i would like to open a conversation about it on this blog. I have to say i’ve struggled to get this article out, since the topic is so ‘En Vogue’. A lot of very smart people are working hard making sense of it and its getting enriched everyday by new research and expert point of views. So i’ve been wondering how to make my contribution meaningful at this point in time. After tweaking the post many times, i have decided that it was ok to just participate in the global conversation by sharing my ‘work in progress’ perspective, personal experiences or even just intuitions. I hope that by sharing and researching on this topic regularly, i’ll develop my knowledge and will build my own toolbox to try and be a better parent.
I’d like to start today with a few initial bets on what kind of mindset changes could help us as parents or educators to be the most useful sherpas possible for our children to prepare the future.
‘Urvertrauen’
…is a word i recently learned from a friend in Berlin. It’s one of those German words that don’t have a direct translation in another language…it means to have a deep “trust in life”, an innate optimism or sense that everything will be ok. I really like this notion, and i feel it may be one of the drivers behind some of the german education principles, at least in Prenzlauerberg, where i live. I was laughing with an american friend recently about Berlin’s “Adventure playgrounds”, where you can find groups of kids as young as 6 years old, chainsaw and hammer in hand, building together a cabin in a tree, lighting a fire, or digging an underground tunnel, with no parent in sight. In regular ‘Spielplatz’ too (=playgrounds, which you can find here at every street corner) toddlers early get to climb giant wooden ladders by themselves, with parents confidently watching from a (safe) distance. They seem to trust their babies’s natural instincts and abilities to conquer their environment and take ‘calculated’ risks.
Going back to our digital/education topic, i feel like as parents, we need to develop this kind of deep trust and optimism in the future, as well as in our children. As an art collective in Berlin puts it so cleverly, ‘The next big thing is not a thing’. The level of ambiguity surrounding our future is unprecedented, and our ‘collective imaginary’ around what the future looks like is challenged.
In front of this ‘projection gap’, we need to find reasons to be optimistic. To me, movements like #metoo, the rise of Parkland students in the fight for gun reform, or even the experimentation fever around technologies like blockchain to create more transparent transactions, change agriculture or even politics are signs there is a hunger to use technology to fix some of the dysfunctions globalisation and capitalism have generated and go back to a healthier, more sustainable way to live.
Which brings me to my next point…
Which problem do you want to solve when you grow up?
May become the new question around the dinner table instead of the classic ‘what do you want to do when you grow up’? I think that ‘Innovative problem solving’ will overtime not only be a useful skill you use in a job, but the very essence of the definition of our role in society.
Admitting that a significant part of current/traditional jobs may be transformed or even become irrelevant, due to technological disruptions, and a new generation of jobs created that we can’t begin to imagine, we need to take a serious look at how we influence children when it comes to choosing studies or career.
There was an interesting article in ‘Le Monde’ recently about why choosing a ‘philosophy curriculum’ may be a smarter move today than ever. In a world of constant technological breakthrough, of too much of everything, all the time, we will need much more people to ask the WHY questions, to think about ethics and question the underlying consequences of progress.
Just the definition of what is a responsible citizen is evolving rapidly. Following a very insightful piece about ‘Functional Sovereignty’, I can see for myself when moving from one country to another how i’m becoming more and more impatient towards local laws, being constantly ‘spoiled’ by the level of service of Uber, Airbnb or even WeChat, anything that doesn’t match those new ‘user experience’ standards seems slightly unacceptable to me. So there seems to be only a tiny step until we live in a world where users/people turn to global platforms when a local government doesn’t deliver.
And with the amount of companies willing to listen to our needs, ‘fix our problems’, and whilst they’re at it getting us hooked to a new ‘tiny red dot’, we need to be very careful about what it is we really do WANT and NEED.
Understand ourselves better, identify our values and drivers and help our children do so will be crucial for them as global citizen/consumers/users, but it will also help them identify the problems they may want to work on solving. In the global competition, I think they will have more pressure to early on ‘choose their battles’, and dedicate learning towards specific topics or causes, identify their unique talents to solve them and develop the leadership skills to bring people onboard with their ideas. It sounds like a company i know, but i feel children will be expected to become more like ‘little companies’, with its positive and negative sides…
So how to you help your children develop their entrepreneurial mindset and become the ‘problem solvers’ of the future’? (…whilst not stealing their childhood away from them?)
Seth Goddin suggests : ‘By giving them interesting problems to solve, and not criticising them when they fail’. I like this idea…so how does this look like in the day to day with a toddler?
What is your superpower?
One of the activities i love in Berlin is going to ‘little art’ with my Daughter. It’s a very simple concept, but so important and rare those days. It’s a ‘child led’ workshop, where children are given a set of tools, a blank sheet of papers, blank walls, and decide what to do with it. As a parent, you are not allowed to ‘show them’ what to do, to start drawing a car and ask them to do it too, no, the child decides, and shows you what they want to do, you’re only suggested to copy what the child is doing as a way of encouraging them. It often results in very new and unexpected use of some of the tools, dirty t-shirts, and repainted walls, but it gives children a real space of freedom to explore.
This idea of making space for children to play, experiment and discover at their own rhythm, as well as put an important focus on arts is at the heart of a lot of recent theories around what will be important for children in the future. A recent interview from Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba, at the Davos forum captured it very well :
‘We cannot teach our kids to compete with machines, they are smarter, we have to teach something unique, that a machine can never catch-up with’… ‘Values, believing, independent thinking, care for others, sports, music, painting, art’…’are among the soft kills we need to teach our children’.
Observing children, and giving them license to uncover ‘their superpower’ will help not only make them happier, more fulfilled individuals, but gain confidence in themselves and their capacity to learn.
My role model for this is my friend Brenda, she’s an incredible woman, mum of a 8 years old, and one of the most creative people i know. She caught an interest in science in her son when he was very little, and as long as i’ve known her, she’s been engineering the most interesting games and experiences for her son, infusing an insatiable love for science and experimentation, that she cleverly uses as a driver to approach other areas of life.
Learn, unlearn, rinse & repeat
Finally, if there is one thing i have experienced first hand working in Digital Marketing for 10 years, and particularly in my last 5 years in Shanghai, is how quickly your knowledge can become irrelevant. When working in London, i spent 2 years getting really deep in project management, because i’m not a ‘natural’ at it, it took me a lot of effort, setbacks and support to get to a stage where i was myself ‘feeling’ what it can be like to be a good project manager and getting recognition from my teams. So then i moved to Shanghai, and was so ready to jump in and apply all of the great tools, techniques i learned and take project management to the next level in my company, which was really needed. Only that, in the time it took me to master ‘traditional’ project management tools, a new wave of ‘Agile’ methods spread from software development to answer needs for brands to be faster, more reactive to change, which, in a country like China is all the more critical. So i quickly realised that if i wanted to stay relevant, i had to adapt my toolbox, I decided to train myself as an agile ScrumMaster, and let go of some of the more ‘traditional’ tools i used to swear by. I plan to go deeper on this topic of another time, but it so happens that agility is the last mindset change i wanted to apply to Parenthood.
As adults, we will probably have to regularly become ‘children’ again ourselves in one area of our of life or another for the rest of our life ; so parenting by setting up a clear core set of values and ‘non-negotiable rules’ and principles, whilst considering education a life-long endeavour and be able to constantly learn and adapt sounds necessary.
When i say that, i feel like some more experienced parents may think ‘ok you’re cute, but that’s what parents have been doing for centuries!’
And that’s right of course. The ‘education cycle’ : parents educate children > children become adults > children become parents themselves and somehow reverse-educate parents at some point based on their experiences, has always existed. But, just like companies now are learning to adapt to technology changes faster by developing more iterative approaches and shorter learning cycles ; We will need to ‘refresh’ our strategy more regularly, accept when we don’t have the answers, be willing to find them together, and most importantly stay deeply connected to our children all the way through! In real life…and online i guess ;) What a challenge!
This somehow more abstract notion will conclude my post for today. I hope i can make it more concrete someday. Maybe you can help me? I would love to hear your thoughts and questions. Next i want to explore the different ways to educate children about technology, the importance of learning programming (or not?) and exposure to screens and social media. Until then, happy learning!
