Prepare our kids for a unpredictable world!

I somehow feel that kids in today's school system are not being prepared for tomorrow. The school system is still the same as it was at my time when things around have moved ahead. I have myself been in the corporate world and then the ever changing online world and realize how the world of yesterday is just so irrelevant. But hey, to make them children of tomorrow, we will need to predict the future. And here’s the thing: we still don’t. We have never been good at predicting the future, and so raising and educating our kids as if we have any idea what the future will hold is not the smartest notion. So the question still arises - how do we prepare our kids (for that matter even ourselves) for the world that is unpredictable, unknown? This requires an entirely different approach to child-rearing and education. It means leaving our old ideas at the door, and reinventing everything.
I have written about few of these skills in the past on what I do with Siya but re-insist them here with respect to this context.
Encourage your child to ask questions -  My boss in netCore once said "The best thing that you can give Siya is learning how to learn". What we want most for our kids, as learners, is to be able to learn on their own. To teach themselves anything. Because if they can, then we don’t need to teach them everything - whatever they need to learn in the future, they can do on their own. Luckily, kids ask questions naturally - all we need to do is simply encourage it. A great way to do this is by modeling it. When you and your child encounter something new, ask questions, and explore the possible answers with your child. When he does ask questions, reward the child instead of punishing him (you might be surprised how many adults discourage questioning).What I have also figured out over a period of time is that anything new be it new environment, new people, new office, new industry - all of it is nothing but solving new problems. Make sure you teach your child how to solve problems. I have seen mothers, when a child encounters a problem, they run themselves to solve it even without allowing their child to even try solving it. Don’t immediately solve all your child’s problems — let her fiddle with them and try various possible solutions, and reward such efforts. Eventually, your child will develop confidence in her problem-solving abilities. I would re-insist everyone to read the blog post Ignite your Passion - How? and Effortless Parenting where I talk a lot about being passionate about something. When I’m so excited that I can’t stop thinking about something, I will inevitably dive into it fully committed, and most times I’ll complete the project and love doing it. Help your kid find things she’s passionate about - it’s a matter of trying a bunch of things, finding ones that excite her the most, helping her really enjoy them. Don’t discourage any interest - encourage them. Don’t suck the fun out of them either - make them rewarding.One thing that has made me the way I am and thanks to my parents for it is Independence. Kids should be taught to increasingly stand on their own. A little at a time, of course. Slowly encourage them to do things on their own. Teach them how to do it, model it, help them do it, help less, then let them make their own mistakes. Give them confidence in themselves by letting them have a bunch of successes, and letting them solve the failures. Once they learn to be independent, they learn that they don’t need a teacher, a parent, or a boss to tell them what to do. They can manage themselves, and be free, and figure out the direction they need to take on their own.Siya also is a kid who is happy by herself. And this is without TV or video games or any other gadgets. She can spend time just reading or writing letters (recently started this new thing) to mom and dad or setting up her room or arranging her cupboard or simply just imagining. This is a valuable skill because it takes a while to have children being happy without parents. And because she finds happiness in making others happy, she has also become very compassionate. Show them empathy by asking how they think others might feel, and thinking aloud about how you think others might feel. Demonstrate at every opportunity how to ease the suffering of others when you’re able, how to make others happier with small kindnesses, how that can make you happier in return. And then finally, teach them how to deal with the change. I believe this will be one of the most essential skills as our kids grow up, as the world is always changing and being able to accept the change, to deal with the change, to navigate the flow of change, will be a competitive advantage. This is a skill I’m still learning myself, but I find that it helps me tremendously, especially compared to those who resist and fear change. Life is a adventure and things will go wrong, turn out differently than you expected and also break all the plans that you had made - but so be it. Life did not come to me with a instruction set - that's all a part of excitement.

We can’t give our children a set of data to learn, a career to prepare for, when we don’t know what the future will bring. But we can prepare them to adapt to anything, to learn anything, to solve anything, and in about 20 years, to thank us for it :-).