219: The skills your child will need in the age of AI

Hi, I'm Adrian in suburban Chicagoland and this is Your Parenting Mojo with Jen Lumanlan. Jen is working on a series of episodes based on the challenges you are having with your child. From tooth brushing to sibling fighting, to the endless resistance to whatever you ask, Jen will look across all the evidence from thousands of scientific papers across a whole range of topics related to parenting and child development to help you see solutions to the issue you're facing that hadn't seen possible before. If you'd like a personalized answer to your challenge, just make a video if possible, or an audio clip if not, it's less than one minute long that describes what's happening and email it to support@YourParentingMojo.com and listen out for your episode soon.

Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. Today we're concluding our mini series on the intersection of parenting and technology, or at least we're concluding it for now with the potential to be reopened if another related topic catches my eye-- or your eye potentially. We started with a conversation with The Gamer Educator Ash Brandin on the topics that parents of younger children are curious about-- things like why they might become dysregulated when we ask them to stop playing, how to set limits on screen time in spite of this dysregulation, and whether children are more likely to be violent if they play video games.

I didn't get a chance to ask Ash a lot of the questions I had on what children learn from video games, so I did a follow up episode on that topic. And today I want to close the loop for now by looking at the kinds of skills children will need in a world that's going to be very different than the one we grew up in, which is itself very different from the one our parents grew up in. Our parents could never imagine social media when they were young. And it wasn't a thing when I was growing up either. The internet was slow to take off in the UK because it was accessed through the phone lines, and the phone company charge the same rate as if you were talking on the phone which was 30p a minute during business hours. I remember walking into the library in Tampa, Florida and asking the librarian if I could use the library's email account to send my friend in Ontario a message, and the librarian walked me over to a public computer and sat me down with a Hotmail sign-up page. I was 19 at the time. For now there are parents in the Parenting and Learning memberships who have never known what it's like not to have social media.

I don't know that anyone who doesn't work in tech had any idea what was about to happen in November 2022 when Chat GPT-3 was released. All of a sudden, we could input queries in natural language and tell it to refine its answers based on specific parameters, and receive responses that collate a variety of sources instead of just looking at a list of websites. It certainly isn't perfect, and it can give nonsensical answers right now, but I think we can safely anticipate that in the next five years, AI capabilities are going to increase dramatically. And companies are already using it to do things like screen potential employees resumes, and providing prompts to call center employees.

If we have kids under the age of 10, and even assuming the idea of working for pay itself isn't going to radically change by the time they're adults, they're going to need a set of skills to navigate the ways that technology will be even further embedded in our lives. I've seen a whole variety of ideas from different places on what are those skills but the most comprehensive vision I found came from a management consulting firm McKinsey. I do have to caveat the McKinsey's ethical practices don't always align with my own. They're the ones who helped Purdue Pharmaceuticals figure out how to aggressively market Oxycontin, which created massive drug dependency problems here in the US. It has advised U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on how to manage detention facilities to cut costs, for example, by serving lower quality food to detainees. And it also earns tens of millions of dollars for consulting for energy advising at trader Enron on its business model including the off-balance sheet accounting practice, which ultimately took the company under.

So I am slightly reticent about using McKinsey's research as my major information source for this episode, but I do know that they know how to research. McKinsey Global Institute, which is a think tank whose mission is to provide a fact base to aid decision making on the economic and business issues most critical to the world's companies and policy leaders developed a set of four major categories of skills for a report that they released. And the four major categories are: cognitive, interpersonal, self-leadership, and digital. Again, that's cognitive, interpersonal, self-leadership, and digital. And there are 13 skill groups within the four categories and a total of 56 distinct elements of talent or DELTAs. They're called DELTAs rather than skills because they're a mixture of skills and attitudes-- things like adaptability is an attitude rather than a skill. And then they surveyed 18,000 people in 15 countries on their proficiency levels for each DELTA.

I don't want to spend too much time walking through the methodology of the report, you can read that in the report itself if you want to. And ultimately, I'm less interested in the proficiency of different groups of people in different countries on each of the DELTAs. What I'm more interested in is the DELTAs themselves the skills and attitudes that our children will need to be successful in a world where we will be able to ask an AI tool, any question we want, and get increasingly accurate answers, and what implications the DELTAs have for what our children should be learning.

While the McKinsey report doesn't make this clear, I think it's really important to note that not every child or person needs to have every one of the 56 skills on this list. Neurodivergent people, especially, are probably going to find they have a lot of skills in some of the areas and really struggle in others. I also don't think the school-based approach of focusing on your weaknesses and getting those up to some minimum standard is necessarily helpful, because that means we end up spending a lot of time on things we aren't very good at. And they're never going to be a core competency for us just to achieve this minimum performance. That means we have less time to spend on things we are really good at and time spent there might take our performance to the next level. I'll talk more about the intersection of neurodivergence and the DELTAs as we go through the list.

So recall that there are four categories of skills-- cognitive, interpersonal, self-leadership, and digital. I'm gonna go through these one by one. And there are four skill groups within the cognitive category: these are communication, critical thinking, mental flexibility, and planning and ways of working. Within the communication skill group, we're looking at DELTAs of active listening, which is the ability to be present to remember what's being said, understand and consider other people's motivations in the future. And if we substitute needs for motivations, we can see how the kind of work we do here in the Your Parenting Mojo world, to understand our own needs, and each other's needs and find strategies that meet both of our needs becomes really important right off the bat. Part of doing this involves the DELTA of asking the right questions, because if you can't ask a question that uncovers the other person's need, or ask yourself why you're having such a hard time, and what that says about your needs, then you won't find strategies that meet both of your needs. There are also DELTAs on storytelling and public speaking, so being able to convey messages appropriately to different audiences, as well as synthesizing large amounts of information into short messages, or though I would argue the AI tools are already fairly skilled at general synthesis of large volumes of information, I do a lot of synthesis for you here on the show. And if that was all I was doing, I say you should look out for the AI-hosted version of the show very soon, but a category of skills that works in lockstep with the communication skill group is the critical thinking skill group.

So the critical thinking group starts with a DELTA of logical reasoning, which means being able to draw logical conclusions based on facts, statements and arguments, as well as identify the strengths and weaknesses of your own and others' arguments. To do this well, you have to seek relevant information and while we might think AI tools have the edge here, since they are trained on the entire internet, and we can only ever know or find *so much,* I think people have the edge here at least for now, people are much better at the DELTA of understanding biases in their thinking, although I would argue that the standard of usually ensuring the biases do not impair their thought processes and decisions is a bit aspirational, since our biases impact every decision we make. Understanding that we have them and ensuring that our own particular biases are aligned with our values is in my view, a much more important skill. Finally, in the critical thinking category, there's structured problem solving, which is the ability to solve difficult problems with non-obvious solutions (for example, climate change) by breaking them down into simpler parts. This DELTA counts down by itself because we've obviously known how to fix climate change for a long time. Having the knowledge to solve difficult problems isn't enough by itself. We also need some of the DELTAs related to communication, entrepreneurship, inspiring others and understanding how political and other organizations work. Again, not every single person needs to have all of these skills and it's totally fine for an individual to specialize in some of the skills and leave others for other people.

I do want to point out something that occurs to me as I read this list so far, which is that we're looking at a very stereotypically masculine way of viewing the world using our logical rational skills to understand issues. While energy, passion and optimism are going to show up in the entrepreneurship category, I don't see any role here for looking within ourselves, intuiting answers rather than arriving at logically derived conclusions, nurturing or caring. There isn't even any role for understanding of morals or values. Not every strategy we arrive at through logical reasoning or even scientific reasoning is a strategy we should ultimately use, we also have to take the extra step of making sure the strategy fits with our morals and values.

Within the mental flexibility category are a number of self-explanatory DELTAs, including the ability to learn adaptability, adopting a different perspective and creativity and imagination. One thing I see missing from the ability to learn DELTA is the WILLINGNESS to learn, it's one thing to be ableABLE to learn a new skill, but if the MOTIVATION to learn is lacking, then the person won't learn. Nurturing that willingness is an important part of the work that we do in the Learning Membership, which we do by identifying your child's interests and scaffolding them effectively. I'll talk more about what scaffolding is and how to do it in a few minutes.

While I might argue that adaptability is indeed a useful skill, the description of the desired proficiency level is "individuals can easily adapt to new situations or ways of working, even when new skills are required." To me, this kind of smacks of a business-centric perspective--I can imagine a company boss saying: oh, sorry, your skills aren't needed anymore. If you want to still be valuable to the company and keep your job, then you have to learn this new set of skills that we now require." Yes, in the current model of capitalism, there has to be a match between the skills a person has and the skills that job requires, but to me, this removes the humanity of it. It reminds me of a comment that a member in the Parenting Membership shared recently, when I asked for information on how aware they are of their menstrual cycles for an episode on that topic. And the member said my feminism was recently questioned by a male supervisor who was aghast when I said that people shouldn't have to work during their luteal phases or menstruation if they experienced difficulties. He said, "it's only recently that women have even been allowed to work despite their periods and globally, some still can't." He completely failed to see my body as anything but a resource to be exploited as labor and to see labor as anything other than a privilege.

It's a model of how people can serve a business, not the other way around. And I hope that our adaptability as well as our creativity and imagination can help us to create more humane ways of being in relationship with each other, including in the working world, and not just the concepts, procedural steps and products that McKinsey wants workers to create.

The last DELTA in the flexibility space is translating knowledge into different contexts. And if you've been listening to recent episodes, you might remember that idea from our conversation on what children learn from video games that I talked about how my daughter Carys had transferred knowledge about how fishing often gives you a lot of points from one video game to another. She had realized that fishing gave her a lot of points in Stardew Valley, which she actually hasn't played in months. And then when she learned a new game called Sneaky Sasquatch, she use fishing to quickly increase her number of points so she could buy a scuba diving kit and explore the ocean. She transfered the knowledge from one game to the other. Transfer is really important in learning because it helps you approach different kinds of challenges without starting from scratch each time, but instead bringing with you the body of knowledge you already have to help you. Children can learn this skill of transferring in a domain like video games, and then we can use metacognition or thinking about thinking to help them see what they've done, which enhances their ability to do it again in other contexts as well. We cover a whole module on metacognition in the Learning Membership, and it's an especially important module, because many people think it isn't even possible for children to do metacognitive thinking. But it turns out that if researchers shift the way they ask their questions, they actually find evidence of metacognitive thinking, even in preschoolers and elementary schoolers. You can learn how to see it too, and when you can see it, you can help your child not just to use more metacognitive thinking, but to use that metacognitive thinking to then learn more effectively.

The last skill group in the cognitive domain is planning and ways of working, which includes agile thinking or the ability to work iteratively and test assumptions and prototypes to create effective solutions. It's difficult for children to do this in school, because in school is a single right answer to any problem the child is trying to address. And the teacher already knows the answer to that problem, and the child's job is to get from their current state of not knowing to the teacher's state of knowing by the fastest route possible. Experimenting and iterating isn't valued in that environment, but we can value it outside of school. I saw this in action recently, when we spent some time in Flagstaff, Arizona and a friend introduced Carys and it to a fantastic place called Tynkertopia. I believe it's in a converted one-storey house and each room has a different focus. There was a toys and games room, a kitchen a book room, but Carys's favorite room was the one stuffed with old containers and craft supplies of every kind imaginable, as well as tools including hot glue guns. Anyone who remembers the massive creation she made in our backyard, that first summer of COVID probably will not be surprised by hearing that. We were in Flagstaff for two weeks and I think we went to Tynkertopia eight times. And one time she made a sort of tree out of bottle caps and a thin stick. So she glued the end of the stick to a gelato container lid, and then she fit the little divots in the bottle caps up against the stick and glued them in place to make the tree branches that could hold small candies. The next day, she iterated on it and made a heavier duty version by gluing lids around a much bigger central stick. And then she glued plastic leaves on it to make it look a bit more like a tree and created a bird's nest by putting a bunch of thin sticks in a pile and then gluing all over them, and then gluing that to the top of the tree. The next day, she went all in on the bird's nest and glued several of those to a new tree structure. She's had a years long fascination with divided trays to put food in and she was iterating on that theme here an entirely following her own creative ideas.

Time management and prioritization, as well as work plan development, are the other DELTAs in planning and ways of working category. And we can also get these in out of school activities. When we're at Tynkertopia, I usually set a time limit of two hours at the most I'm willing to sit, because they have a rule that adults can't work on other things while kids are creating. So she has to plan her time to prioritize what she wants to make. As she begins to develop more complex projects that take more than one session to complete, she has to identify the critical path items and the interdependencies between them, like we don't have time to paint this and have it dry and then finish the functionality. So if we do the functionality first, we can paint it afterwards and we can dry it at home. This kind of learning can happen just as effectively outside of schools inside it and perhaps even more so because he's so invested in having her creation come out the way she wants it to. People with ADHD might struggle with some of these DELTAs, and I think we should support them and getting as much proficiency with these as they need to succeed and their self-chosen goals. I also think we have to surface non traditional ways of succeeding from people in the ADHD community. I know that neurotypical people will often advise people with ADHD to make lists if you can't remember things to do make a list. But what I've recently learned is that some people with ADHD can devise decidedly non-listy ways of remembering things, including setting up a schedule of tasks that are repeated often, and then when a step in the list is missing, the person doesn't just use what's next on the list as a reminder of what to do, but also a range of sensory emotional, spatial and temporal clues to remind them of the next step or the task. It isn't a failsafe system because sometimes the routine that keeps all the pieces in place gets interrupted but it's more reliable than not making lists or not looking at the list you've made. I would love to see more knowledge in our communities about ways of developing skills related to creating work plans And managing time that work for people whose brains work in all kinds of different ways.

Second of the big four categories of skills is interpersonal, and within that there are the skill groups of mobilizing systems, developing relationships and teamwork effectiveness.

The first DELTA in the mobilizing systems category is crafting an inspiring vision which is bringing to life an idealized future that inspires a large group of people to realize the vision. I see Carys doing this on a small scale at the not-school program she attends where she regularly has the other eight kids in the program following her around the farm in a line pretending to be turkeys, because there are wild turkeys running around the farm. But not every child or adult wants to be a leader. There are plenty of people who don't want to be out in front of an idea, but who wants to support the visionary leader. The world needs those supporters as well as the people with the ideas. There's also organizational awareness meaning the understanding of both formal and informal procedures, roles, and decisions, which is where I had a hard time in consulting. I was fine with the formal procedures but I just couldn't get the back channel communications and politics that would get things done. We can start to help our children notice not just formal rules but informal ones, like how long you should wait after you've texted a friend's parent to find out if they can have a playdate before you call to follow up on whether the friend can have a playdate. Obviously things get more complex in the business world but we can start there and build up.

Role modeling is the third DELTA in mobilizing systems meaning the ability to role model a certain behavior and generate in others the willingness or desire to emulate it. Having worked in consulting for a number of years, I know companies that are making changes, look out for the role model the people whom others look up to and who are on board with the change, and they use those people to drag everyone else through the change. So this DELTA strikes me as a little too business convenient, although I acknowledge that role modeling behaviors has valuable and legitimate purposes outside the business realm. We can role model the kind of social changes we want to see in the world as well as working longer hours and never taking vacation.

I was happy to see win-win negotiation as the last DELTA in this category, which we can reframe as finding strategies that meet everyone's needs, nd McKinsey actually phrases that way in the developing relationships category of inspiring trust where the desired proficiency level is, individuals consider the needs of other human beings to be as important as their own and inspire trust by acting accordingly. To me, that should be the first DELTA on the list because it's a huge part of all the other interpersonal DELTAs. You might have an amazing vision, but if it doesn't meet other people's needs, they're not going to come on board with you. I'm not sure that McKinsey authors fully thought through the implications of the idea of considering the needs of other human beings as important as their own because right now, the entire way that businesses operate is to see some people's needs as more important than others, but to hide that fact, in layers of supply chains. Clothing company Patagonia had audited all of its tier one factories for slave labor in 2007. A tier one factory is a factory that's making the finished products that Patagonia sells. The company did find some evidence of modern day slavery in those factories, and stopped working with those suppliers, although we can imagine that they probably picked up business from other brands. In 2011, they audited their second tier suppliers and found that migrant workers from places like Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia and the Philippines, were being charged as much as $7,000 by labor brokers for jobs in Taiwan as well as a monthly fee to keep their jobs. Between all of these fees employees end up not being able to pay back the brokers with their low salaries, which makes this as an example of modern day slavery. Patagonia came up with a new set of employment standards for migrant workers ask companies to reimburse any fees that were above legal limits, and has asked suppliers to get rid of fees for all newly hired employees. Patagonia's work is necessary and commendable, but tier two suppliers are usually the ones who are making the fabric. Before the fabric is made, there's fiber production, like cotton growing sheep shearing, goose down plucking, or the oil drilling and the splitting of oil molecules to make things like polyester precursors. After the raw materials are ready, they're spinning and dyeing before you even get to the tier two suppliers that Patagonia has audited, but very few other companies ever do. When we pay less than $20 for a T shirt, we don't have to investigate the supply chain. We can just know that there are slave labor involved somewhere in it. The system rests on us not seeing the workers needs for a dignified life as as important as our own. I would love to see the full business implications of all employees truly considering other people's needs as important as their own.

The other DELTAs within the developing relationships category are empathy, humility and sociability. As we think about empathy, I also want to pull forward the idea of digital ethics from the digital category because I think we have a long way to go here. Empathy is defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another while the desired proficiency level for digital ethics says: "Individuals understand that digital interactions and tools have ethical impacts, for example, privacy, accountability, algorithm bias, and can take extra measures to avoid creating harm to themselves or others." Mackenzie's report showed that empathy and digital ethics were among the DELTAs that had the lowest correlation to education, with digital ethics actually having the lowest correlation. In other words, people who have many years of education have about the same level of digital ethics as people with no education, which means people are not learning about digital ethics in school. We see evidence of this in the news on a regular basis. While I was preparing this episode, the news broke about middle schoolers in Pennsylvania who impersonated their teachers on TikTok, and posted disparaging lewd racist homophobic videos. After administrators discovered the post, two students publicly posted an 'apology' video on the account that used the name of a teacher as a handle. The students describe the imposter videos as a joke and so the teachers had blown the situation out of proportion. One of them said: "We never meant for it to get this far. Obviously, I never wanted to get suspended." Not only do these students demonstrate a complete lack of digital ethics in terms of the impact their actions could have on others, they turn the situation around and made it all about their suffering. The students getting briefly suspended was far worse in their minds than the harm they've inflicted on the teachers. There are a lot of failures happening when children think that it's okay to treat other children and even their teachers in this way. And I would argue the biggest failure is in the children's ability to see another person's needs as as important as their own. I see that children who are raised with an understanding that their parents believe the child's needs are important, are then more willing to treat others' needs as important as well.

The final DELTA in the Developing Relationships skill group is sociability where the desire proficiency level of acting in a friendly and sociable manner towards others, making them feel comfortable. And if you listen to the recent episode on Should we teach our children social skills? then I'm sure you can anticipate my comfort with this delta it assumes a neurotypical disposition, and that people who are neurotypical should mask their neurodivergence so as to appear friendly and sociable. I would ditch this DELTA actually and instead focus on accepting other people as they are whether or not that can be classified as friendly and sociable.

The third skill group in the interpersonal category is Teamwork Effectiveness, which involves empowering others, which seems to actually mean delegation, motivating different personalities, resolving conflict And fostering inclusiveness. I actually don't think we need a DELTA on motivating different personalities if we already know how to understand other people's needs, because their needs are their motivations to take action. I do appreciate that the resolving conflict, DELTA's desired proficiency level is that individuals consider disagreement to be normal, and tend to identify and address potential conflicts because disagreement is normal. We get into a lot of trouble when we assume that disagreement isn't normal, and that if we're disagreeing something is terribly wrong, and we have to make it go away as fast as possible. Many of us didn't learn how to disagree in a healthy way in our families of origin. So learning how to see the different needs underneath a disagreement, And finding ways to meet both people's needs becomes a core skill.

I think McKenzie missed the mark a bit with both the name and the definition of Fostering Inclusiveness, which is the ability to appreciate diversity, and create psychological safety that fosters different points of view and ways of thinking from people of any background and orientation. I'm reminded of that cartoon of a tall person, a medium-sized person and a short person trying to peer over a fence to watch a baseball game. And all three are standing on boxes, but the short person still can't see that's equality. In the equity picture, the tall person can see without a box, so the short person has two boxes, and now everyone can see over the fence. McKinsey's definition seems to imply that we're giving everyone a bit more than they're getting right now by considering their ideas, but it stops far short of centering around people whose views have been historically marginalized, who are likely to help us design products and solutions that work better for all of us.

The third of the four big categories is Self-Leadership and within that we've got a subcategory of entrepreneurship. Three skills categories within that are self- awareness and self-management, entrepreneurship itself, and goals achievement. Self-awareness and self-management have quite a few DELTAs. These are integrity, self-confidence, self-control and regulation, self-motivation and wellness, understanding own emotions and triggers, and understanding own strengths. I have to say it does strike me as just slightly ironic that McKinsey is lecturing us about integrity with ideal performance of individuals are honest And have strong moral principles that guide them in any situation because it seems as though at least some of the top level individuals at McKinsey have suboptimal proficiency on that DELTA. They don't seem to be lacking self-confidence, though. But it's the pairing of integrity with self-confidence that's important. Self-confidence without integrity leads to ethical failures.

Self-control and self-regulation is an interesting one. The definition is the ability to be rational and control emotions in patterns of behaviors, even in emotionally charged moments with ideal performance of individuals can control their emotions and habits in a way that they never interfere with their work performance. This links right back to the idea of rationality we talked about already were approaching challenges from a calm and rational mindset is always preferred to approaching them from an emotional mindset. But perhaps in our minds, we can imagine a mid-level manager coming into a situation where they find their company is, I don't know, aggressively marketing addictive painkillers or advising their government on how to cut costs by treating people in humane ways or engaging in other kinds of corrupt behavior. We can imagine that in cases like this, an emotional response might have been a wholly appropriate counterpoint to the cool rational logic that apparently made those actions seem entirely appropriate. But even in instances where we aren't talking about criminal misconduct, we might sometimes find ourselves feeling emotional at work. I'm in some online groups for working parents and when someone posts a question about what they should do when they feel emotional at work, about a quarter of the commenters say they should find constructive ways to express it. While the other three quarters say the original poster should learn to control their emotions, because expressing emotions is unprofessional. I'm not arguing you should let it all hang out at work and say whatever we like to whomever we like, but that there should be SOME space for us to exist as emotional beings in the workplace. We should be able to say when we're having a hard day or when we're feeling angry or sad, we can say in a way that doesn't blame another person and make them responsible for what's going on with us by owning that these are our feelings, and we have some needs that aren't being met right now, and also that we want to understand what's going on with the other person, and what unmet needs they have and how we can meet both of our needs. Emotions can inform that process, if we let them, they don't have to be things we stuffed down so that we can use our masculine logic, they can guide us toward understanding the disagreements we already know are important, and then toward resolving them productively.

I do think understanding your own strengths is really important with desired proficiency level of individuals know their strengths so well, they can predict challenges, and can succeed even beyond their areas of expertise. It can be challenging to know And develop your strengths in school because everyone's required to spend time doing the same things, and everyone has different strengths. Plus, there's usually a focus on uncovering the child's WEAKNESSES, and bringing those areas of weakness up as close as possible to average performance, rather than developing the child's unique strengths. That's where working with your child at home, whether or not they're in school can really help them. At home you aren't constrained by a curriculum or state standards, or whatever the other 25 kids in the class are trying to learn, or the weaknesses that the teacher is trying to shore up for them. You can scaffold your child's learning, which is where you pay close attention to them as they're engaged in a task, and we have a whole module on how to do this in their Learning Membership. When they're making good progress on a task by themselves, you kind of sit back And let them lead. When you see them start to struggle, you use your deep knowledge of them and what they do when they're struggling to know whether and how to step in. So maybe they purse their lips up in a certain way when they're having just a bit of a hard time and because you know that about them, you can sit forward a little bit, but you don't say anything. And then when they grunt, you know that they're still struggling, and they're going to give up soon. And you can move in a little more and offer just the right support, which might be just a few words, something like: what if we try it this way? If they're still struggling, you could offer a bit more support, perhaps you offer to guide their hands while they do the task or maybe even do a particularly complicated piece for them. But as soon as you see they've got it, you back off again, so that you're not taking over the project. And on the other end of the skill level, if you see the task is very easy for them, you might decide to offer something that makes it more challenging, trying a different technique or adding something to the outcome that's different from how your child has done it before. You don't have to make things more difficult every time there's something to be said for doing things in a way that feels easy and comfortable sometimes, but it also helps us to grow our skills and talents when we push ourselves a bit. And knowing how to scaffold your child's ability to push themselves toward their self-chosen goals is really important.

We see this idea showing up in the Goals Achievement category as well, which includes DELTAs of having an achievement orientation, coping with uncertainty, having grit and persistence, ownership and decisiveness as well as self-development. When we're scaffolding their learning effectively, children learn how to distinguish between end goals and the means to achieve them, and can change strategies to achieve these goals because they've been practicing doing it with you. You've been observing them closely and helping them to select appropriate strategies that are within their skill level for years. Therefore, then when they need it, but slowly withdrawing support as their competence increases, so they can do it by themselves.

When a person is working on a self-chosen goal, they automatically feel ownership. And when they've been practicing making their own decisions about how to pursue their self-chosen goals, they won't struggle to do that in the future either. That's why children learn so much more about a topic when it's something they're interested in, and are more motivated to keep learning about it and iterating on their ideas. They'll still be able to learn things that don't particularly interest them when it's in service of their self-chosen goal.

Self-development means the ability to reflect on personal performance and seek feedback from others to continuously improve. People who think a lot about learning call that metacognition, which basically means thinking about thinking, and this is also quite hard to do effectively in school. Some still, schoolwork will encourage children to make a plan before setting out on an activity, which is an important part of metacognition, but there's a lot more involved than just making a plan. We also have to analyze the task, develop some expectation of the outcome we want to achieve, determine our interest level, and estimate how effective we're going to be in achieving the desired outcome. We might think we want our children to put in 100% effort in all of their tasks, but that's probably not actually an effective use of their time and energy. We don't approach all of our tasks that way. There are some tasks where the outcome is really important to us. And we think we can do well at it, or we can find the strategies and tools that we need to do it well. And we want to be recognized for doing the work and we go all out on that. And then there are other tasks where we don't care that much about the outcome and the task, isn't in ourcore competency, and we aren't that interested in learning more about it. And maybe nobody's looking that closely anyway at the outcome, or the outcome isn't incredibly important. And we kind of put in a minimum amount of effort. That's actually a smart way to use our energy. Because if we gave 100% to every project, and especially every work project, we wouldn't have anything left for ourselves. Learning how to decide which projects deserve 100% of our focus, and which can get by with less than that is a skill that many of us didn't start to develop until adulthood.

In school grades ATTEMPT to support metacognition by providing feedback on performance after the fact. But grades are really a judgment of performance rather than feedback. When your child hands on assignment in and two weeks later, they get it back with a grade and a one line comment on it, they probably won't understand very much about what specifically they did well, or could have done better. And the whole process of grading does not encourage the child to reflect on their performance at all. It's much more difficult to know how to improve your performance when you haven't really reflected on what skills, effort, and approaches you brought to the task, and how each of them contributed to how the project turned out, and what you might want to adjust in the future.

The aspects of metacognition that school really doesn't address at all is what happens during the task itself. As the person focuses their attention, provides self -instruction on what to do next, and self-observation on how things are going. Most of the time, kids in school are doing assignments by themselves or with other students who likely don't know a lot about metacognition either. It's hard to learn a new skill when nobody else around us knows much about it either. But when you know about metacognition, you can help your child develop it, and then their achievement orientation and their ownership over the outcomes of their learning and their work follows. If you've heard my episodes on grit and growth mindset, then you'll know I have some serious misgivings about the importance of these two particular qualities. They can make a relatively small difference in people's outcomes. But more often, they're used to justify not doing more about structural conditions that make life harder for some children than others. If we take a class full of kids who are struggling because of poverty, and all the conditions that go along with that, and we tell them: "Grit, Growth mindset. You're in charge of your own destiny" then we're seeing the challenges they face as ones that are their responsibility to overcome, rather than ours to look at any more closely and do something about.

The DELTA in this category that gives me the most pause is Coping with Uncertainty, which is defined as the ability to operate effectively in situations with high uncertainty, or when things do not go according to plan. I see a lot of value in that, especially when we're working towards self-chosen goals in dealing and in dealing with inherent life uncertainty. But ideal performance is described as individuals consider uncertainty to be the default state and keep operating effectively unaffected by unexpected changes. And I can imagine this would be quite a useful skill when you're a consulting firm who often recommends layoffs to your clients, but you want employees to not panic when they see you coming and keep working like they were before. Not to mention the uncertainty involved in the favorite employee schedule, scheduling practice of a decade ago just in time scheduling, where workers might have to call in two hours before their shift to see if they should show up wreaking havoc on budgeting and childcare. While California, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, Pennsylvania and New York now have some cities or even the entire state protecting people's notice of their work schedule, Iowa, Arkansas, Tennessee and Georgia have passed laws that expressly prohibit local governments from passing laws that allow employees to predict their upcoming work schedules. Yes, uncertainty is an inherent part of life. But it doesn't have to be an inevitable part of doing business unless we make the choice for it to be that way.

The final skills group within the Self-Leadership category is Entrepreneurship, which includes the DELTAs of breaking orthodoxies courage and risk-taking, driving change and innovation and energy, passion and optimism. Neurodivergent people can be some of the people who best embody these skills and particularly people with ADHD. A 2021 study of over 17,000 people who were born in one week in the UK in 1970, and they were completed nine surveys about their lives in the intervening decades, found that approximately 29% of the entrepreneurs in the example experience symptoms associated with ADHD and childhood. Other sources cite an overall ADHD prevalence rate in adulthood should be somewhere between two and a half to 6.7%. So people with ADHD become entrepreneurs at a massively higher rate than the general population.

Yet the characteristics of neurodivergent people which often include things like breaking orthodoxies, and risk-taking, are not usually valued in childhood. When we were young, our parents might have tried to rationalize these qualities away by saying things like: "When you're a grown up, you'll be a lawyer because you love arguing so much." Sometimes, parents feel over whelmed by their children's constant physical movement and they try to get the child to stop moving as much. We tell them to stop jumping on the couch because things might get broken or they might get hurt. And then the movement might come out anyway as a constant crashing into things or hitting siblings or even hitting parents. The child's looking for physical stimulation, and when we see and meet that need, we also support their need to be truly seen and heard and understood and loved for who they really are. They can learn to embrace their neurodivergence and the benefits it brings, as well as the challenges.

I also want to acknowledge that breaking orthodoxies and driving change and innovation as McKinsey imagines them may not really be what we need. In an article called How my schooling taught me contempt for the earth, author Bill Bigelow writes movingly about growing up close to where I live in Northern California, spending every after school moment weekend and summer day outside until it got dark. He knew where to dig the best underground forts to avoid the heavy clay soil, where to find salamanders, how tadpoles transitioned into frogs, and the relative speed of various snakes. He and his friends dug forts, build tree houses, hiked, explored, caught every reptile they could find, played kick the can over great distances and built forts out of driftwood.

Bigelow said that in school, he learned about "Indians" in the abstract, but not about the Miwoks, who inhabited the land being converted into subdivisions. Because they weren't encouraged to reflect on the theft of the land by the Spanish and then by the United States, or the rich, interdependent web of species that lived on the land of which people were once an integral part. The filling in of wetlands to build a neighborhood and a junior high school and a highway extension just seemed like an inevitable part of progress. He wrote, "No one asked whether we agreed with this development. In fact, we weren't asked to consider it at all. I almost wrote that we watched helplessly as streams were buried and the hills invaded by construction crews. But in truth, we didn't watch helplessly. We watched unconsciously. It never occurred to me to question the environmental justice of these actions. We may or may not have learned how to diagram a sentence, but we did learn *not to question.*"

The subdivision developers were driving change in innovation, probably with energy and passion and optimism. They may even have had to take some risks along the way. But when breaking orthodoxies is defined as the ability to identify and expose situations where orthodoxies and conventional wisdom may hinder progress, and where progress represents new neighborhoods and junior high schools and highway extensions, progress doesn't always serve us. Breaking orthodoxies might mean advocating for change in a way that AI developers and the business community more broadly, doesn't mean when they say progress.

The last category of skills and I really do mean the last because there are four categories organized in a quadrant which consultants always love. And this is the last one on the lower right, and it's Digital. And this incorporates the skill groups of Digital Fluency and Citizenship, Software Use and Development, and Understanding Digital Systems.

Digital literacy is admittedly something that's hard to achieve without being online, since it involves regularly using the internet And popular software including AI. I think digital learning is a much bigger skill set, and many parents I work with skip right over the most important elements of it in a rush to answer their child's questions. Digital Learning is defined "as the ability to develop valid knowledge of selected subject areas from a broad range of digital information," with a desired proficiency level of: "When seeking to learn something individuals can draw upon online resources, knowing how to identify the most reliable sources." In the Learning Membership this is an idea that cuts through whatever topic the member's child is interested in. I know that when some people want their child to learn about a topic, or even their child's interested in it, the parent cues up a playlist of YouTube videos for their child to watch. But for me, that misses the most important part of digital learning. What your child learns and retains about the phases of the moon or a Minecraft or salamanders is much less important to digital learning than how they do that. So if we're trying to identify a salamander, what words and phrases do we put into a search engine? If we just type brown Salamander, do we get anything useful? Do we get more accurate results if we look for distinguishing features on the salamander and add those? If we see that all of our results are coming from the East Coast, and we're in California, perhaps we should specify our location as well. Once we get some results we think might be useful, how can we trust them? Can we tell whether it should site is trying to sell us something? Should we trust sites that are trying to tell us something as much as a site that isn't? Do we trust sites with a .edu domain more or less than a .com site? If we find a video on the topic, how can we tell if it might tell us something useful? Does it make a difference if the thumbnail is a cartoon or a person dressed In a dirty t-shirt or in a suit? If we read the title of the page or the video, what clues can we get about whether it might answer our question? Can we compare the length of the video with the complexity of our question and get an indication of whether we might find what we're looking for? Does it seem like the person in the video has formal qualifications, like being a professor and a related topic? Or in formal qualifications like life experience? Do we value one of these more than the other for this particular question? Or does it not matter? All of these are conversations we can have with our child, as we're looking at the answer to their question, and all of which are more important than the actual answer to their question, because the answers to these questions form a habit of how we approach learning that will stick with our child for far longer than the actual answers. The habit of how learning is approached in school is to get from the question to the answer as fast as possible, which is why just Googling it seems like the thing that's going to help our child the most. But when we do that, we miss out on the opportunity to engage in the critical thinking of evaluating the sources and as AI models get more sophisticated, and the people using them get more sophisticated at using them to create things that look more and more real, the ability to critically evaluate sources is going to become well even more critical.

The final part of Digital Fluency and Citizenship is digital collaboration, which means collaborating effectively through digital channels like email, video, conference, file sharing platforms and other messaging applications. And these skills will change as new methods of communicating become available a couple of years ago, voice messaging was the hot thing to do. And then there was a predictable backlash of people getting frustrated about having to take the time to listen to someone's meandering 10-minute voicemail. We might all wish that people would know when it's okay to keep messaging in writing and when it's time to pick up the dratted phone already. But perhaps the bigger skill is knowing when someone's using messaging passively aggressively. Although McKinsey actually doesn't say anything about that.

In the category of understanding Digital Systems, we have Cybersecurity Literacy, Data Literacy, Smart Systems and Tech Translation and Enablement. And I would absolutely agree cybersecurity literacy is critically important even for our youngest kids. If they're playing online, they are probably our family's weakest cybersecurity link. If anyone's going to give out their name and address and birthday, it will probably be our child. If anyone is going to click a random link or download a file with malicious content, it is probably going to be our child. Along with teaching them about the trustworthiness of sources for our learning, we should also teach them how to recognize sites that are likely trying to steal our information, and how to assess whether or not we can trust a particular download. Honestly, I'm not even really sure what the DELTA for Data Literacy means. It has a definition of "the ability to understand the processes and alternative strategies for data creation, collection validation and storage." I guess I fail that one. Smart Systems is the ability to use smart devices to improve the efficiency of day to day activities to which I would add the component of understanding the privacy trade-offs in using smart devices to improve the efficiency of day to day activities. Perhaps having every entry to our home recorded and sent to a company is an acceptable price to pay for a security system. Perhaps having every conversation inside are heard at home recorded might not be an acceptable price to pay just to be able to order groceries by speaking. Tech Translation and Enablement means "the ability to act as a bridge between technology experts and business experts or customers," which is obviously an important skill set for some people, but the existence of this skill set means there are going to be technology experts who don't have it and business experts who don't have it and customers who don't have it, so this one's going to be important for some people, but not for everyone.

Under the category of Software Use and Development, we have the DELTAs of Computational and Algorithmic Thinking, Data Analysis and Statistics, and Programming Literacy. We've introduced the idea of algorithmic thinking in the Learning Membership as well when we learned about an approach to math called cognitively guided instruction or CGI. There's a lot more to that than we can cover here but at its heart, CGI recognizes children as mathematical thinkers, and allows children to devise their own strategies or algorithms to solve problems rather than forcing them to adopt a standard strategy or algorithm. When a child develops And uses their own algorithm, they don't just learn to apply the formula. If the teacher says the right one to use, like I learned math, but they understand why the formula works. They might even devise an algorithm that doesn't yield the correct answer. And then you can work through it together to understand what happened. It's not that the child's way is wrong, and they should have done it your correct way, but that with an adjustment their algorithm will work just as well as yours. This approach is doubly effective when it's used to solve real world problems that the child wants to understand, like whether it's actually possible to build a scale model of a whale in the living room, or or how many pizza slices each person will get, or how many eggs we will have to buy to make sure there's enough cake for everyone at the party. Then when we use problems about topics children don't care about. I mentioned in the what is your child learning from video games episode that some workbook managers have tried to manufacture interest by linking workbooks to children's favorite computer game characters, but this will only ever be a pale imitation of genuine interest in solving the actual problem.

We might think that the fact there's a DELTA on Programming Literacy, which is defined as "the ability to understand the principles of software development and coding," means that we should sign our child up for coding camp ASAP. How else are they going to learn the principles of software development and coding except by learning how to develop software and by coding. Software Developer Joe Morgan wrote a lovely piece in Slate a few years ago called I'm a developer, I won't teach my kids to code and neither should you. He observed the huge landscape of books and clubs and apps and summer camps all geared at teaching young children coding, but then says that coding books for kids present coding as a set of problems with correct solutions. But that's not the way programming works. Programming is messy. Programming is a mix of creativity and determination. He describes instances of writing code that worked for its desired function and then broke something else. Another time he wrote code that worked, but it was so messy, his boss made him rewrite it. All the easy problems have been automated or solved with open source code. What's left is the difficult task of creating something unique, and there aren't any books that teach you how to solve a problem that no one has seen before. It's apparently the feeling of quality that's the hardest thing for many developers to master, which he noticed his young son observing as their family made sugar cookies. And he observed the texture and the color of the mixture after each ingredient addition, whether it was mixed homogenously how to roll the dough thinly and evenly, how to place the cookie cuts to minimize waste. Yes, they were following a recipe, but they want to just executing steps--they were also teaching the child about quality, which can only be passed on through feel through physical experience. After all, most children won't actually go on to code in their careers. No matter how embedded AI gets into our lives, it won't require all of us to know how to program it, and our kids will need a lot more knowledge than they got from a coding for kindergarteners out to do that anyway. And if they do decide to be aI programmers, they can learn the syntax pretty easily if it's a self-chosen goal. But an understanding of quality and creativity and I would add the ability and the motivation to understand how to close the inevitable holes they will find in their knowledge, are much more important skills than knowing how to code. I also want to make sure to notice how Joe Morgan is teaching his son about quality. It isn't through lectures about quality-- it's through his son's physical experiences. In school, everything that's worth learning about is learned by your brain through your eyes reading print on your ears, listening to the teacher. In the real world children learn with their bodies. We used to learn a lot more that way too before we learn to stop moving. Joe Morgan's son learned by closely observing the cookie dough using multiple senses. He's looking at the dough probably also listening to the different sounds that happen as the ingredients are mixed in, smelling the vanilla, touching the dough as it's rolled, tasting the end product. Baking Cookies is a whole body experience and we have an entire module in the Learning Membership on how children learn in this way so that we can see it when it's happening, and build on it as well.

So that's it --as far as McKinsey is concerned-- for the skills children will need to succeed in the age of AI. Obviously, this set of skills is very focused on technology and we're missing a whole suite of skills related to things like art appreciation, making art, languages, history, which can help us to understand where we've come from, which then hopefully helps us to not keep making the same mistakes over and over again. There's no mention of spatial awareness and an immediate sense of what's around our bodies, or the broader sense of place-based learning, which is the idea that we can be deeply rooted in a place and know it intimately and care about it with passion. The connections with other people are all about motivating them to take actions that are aligned with this mythical idea of progress. They aren't about real connections, where we see each other's humanity and we work to lift each other up, because we see that our thriving as human beings is tied up with everyone else's and with non-human beings as well. So the list is a starting point rather than a complete set of necessary skills.

So we wrap up with our usual three ideas to try if you want to take the ideas in this episode forward with your own child and I'm going to give you these a little out of order. So the mid-level learning option is to join the You Are Your Child's Best Teacher workshop that runs between August 7th and 13th. You'll get one short email per weekday during that period with an idea to think about and something to try with your child, and the weekend in between to do a learning exploration with your child. You'll get my support and a pop-up community as well and you'll see learning in an entirely different light, knowing that your child's interests will lead both of you into deep learning that touches so many of the DELTAs we've discussed in this episode. You'll also see that you don't need any special knowledge, skills, or qualifications to teach them effectively. All you need is to be able to connect your child with resources which we will show you how to do. You will come out of the workshop both BEING and BELIEVING that YOU really are your child's best teacher. It's totally free and you can sign up for it at YourParentingMojo.com/bestteacher.

And if one short email and homework per day sounds a bit too much for you to take on right now, then join us for the entry level curious idea which is the You Are Your Child's Best Teacher masterclass, which will have all the main ideas from the full workshop in one 90-minute session. That's coming up at 11am Pacific on Thursday, August 15th. The masterclass is also totally free, you can sign up for that at YourParentingMojo.com/bestteachermasterclass.

And if you are ready to dive all in with our highest level growth homework, I would love to see you in the Learning Membership. Enrollment is officially open from August 16th through the 26th. But we have a special presale open right now where you can save 10% on your first payment, whether that's monthly or annual when you sign up by August 15th and use coupon code EARLYBIRD10 with all the letters capitalized. I know it's hard to remember to do things in a set window when you're either on summer vacation or in the middle of back to school so I made it easier for you by extending the enrollment window and offering you a discount as well. We have sliding scale pricing, money back guarantee, so there's no risk at all to check out the ideas and support you'll get inside the membership. So learn more and sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/LearningMembership. We get started formally with that on September 1st. And all of the papers I referenced for this episode plus the links I mentioned can be found on the episode page at YourParentingMojo.com/AI.

If you'd like Jen to address the challenge you're having in parenting, just email your one minute video or audio clip to support@YourParentingMojo.com and listen out for your episode soon.