You will travel far. But we will never leave you. The richness of our lives shall be yours. All that I have, all that I’ve learned, everything I feel... all this, and more, I bequeath you, my son. You will make my strength your own, and see my life through your eyes, as your life will be seen through mine.
~ Jor-El, Superman’s dad, 1978
The desire to understand the origins of our universe is as old as thought itself. We’ve searched the stars and listened to the darkness beyond for millennia, analysed the celestial crumbs that fall to earth and pioneered technologies to help us extract the smallest facts from the grandest theories. In the late 1970s a team of European scientists dreamed of journeying through both space and time to land a probe on a speeding comet to find an answer to this oldest of riddles. It was a whimsical idea at a time when mankind hadn’t even seen a comet up close. But their outlandish notion grew and grew with complete disregard for the confines of reality until there was no stopping it. It gathered 250 scientists from 11 countries and $1.7 billion of funding for a 30-year journey back to the beginning of the beginning.
Christened the Rosetta Mission, it is the most conceptually and technologically audacious act of discovery ever undertaken: to chase a comet across the galaxy for 10 years with a probe the size of an SUV ricocheting across our inner solar system at speeds of 66,000 kilometres per hour through megalithic asteroid belts, ice, gas, dust and whatever else is out there. After 19 years of research, committees, permissions and setbacks – it was done. The Rosetta probe was launched in 2004 on an unknowable journey that would, hopefully, last a full decade.
For three years of that journey Rosetta slept in deep space hibernation, alone in a faraway orbit, in the coldest regions of space, 520 million kilometres from home. Then in 2011 she woke herself up and figured out where she was in space by comparing what she saw with stellar images stored in her databank. After hours of searching she finally found earth and called home, “Hello it’s Rosetta. I’m fine, I’ve just woken up and here I am.” Mission control in Germany couldn’t have been happier or more proud.
In November 2014 Rosetta reached her target, her raison d’être, in the outer reaches of our solar system – an ice and dust ball a mere four kilometres wide, tearing through space 130 times faster than the top speed of a Boeing A380. Rosetta released her Philae lander to rendezvous with this icy comet known as 67P, and the real work of looking back 4,600 million years to figure out how our solar system developed from ancient primordial chaos, began.
Were there risks to this operation? Could the team at mission control have done everything possible to ensure that the mission, their reputations and taxpayer’s money weren’t compromised in any way? Yes, of course there were both known and unknown risks – all of them huge. Despite 19 years of planning and research the team could never have guaranteed the success of this mission. In fact, when Rosetta’s lander reached the surface of the comet, it was greeted with ice and dust far softer than expected. It drifted, bounced twice, failed to fire its harpoons and came to rest in a dark, shadowy crater, well hidden from sunlight. With its last ounce of solar power, it radioed home to say that it was out of energy and shutting down till it found the sun again, or the sun found it.
Parenting today is not too different from running a space exploration programme. As far as funding goes, kids and space bots usually cost more than we budgeted for. The first 18 years, maybe more, are a flurry of designing, learning, testing, correcting and improving the skills and personalities of our offspring. Despite preparing them for the journey of life with the utmost care and attention, there are simply too many known and unknown variables at play for us to be confident that nothing will go wrong. Come launch day we still won’t know exactly what lies out there on their path. The unknown is risky business and exactly why NASA, the ESA and their global peers employ a team of the smartest brains with specialist skills in every area needed for each project. To quote from their website: “It takes hundreds of people; machinists, engineers, scientists, programmers and many others to get a spacecraft from the planning stages to its destination in outer space.” The Rosetta Mission took over 1,000 brains to get to launch and even then, success was merely one of the possible outcomes.
Can you imagine the parenting equivalent? Beginning with fertility specialists, a maternity team consisting of prenatal yoga instructor, nutritionist, nursery decorator, financial planner and second hand car dealer. Followed by the prelaunch team of early childhood specialists, paediatricians, fitness trainers, life coaches, caregivers, babysitters, party entertainers – and we haven’t even started on school and extra-everything class specialists.
If you are a parent, you don’t have to imagine any of this – except the government-funding bit. You will already know that it takes hundreds of specialists, project-managed by you, to launch a child on the path to his or her dream. But there is something that the teams at NASA or the ESA do very differently to you and I, something that helps ensure that all those tax dollars result in valuable outcomes to their space programmes despite daunting odds. Before any space agency launches a space bot off into what seems like unchartered territory, the team will already have spent a great deal of time and resources researching and understanding the environment that the bot is most likely to encounter throughout its cosmic adventure. This includes the stresses that its software, hardware and structure will face over time. Materials are selected that can withstand harsh and unpredictable conditions. Failsafes are encoded into software to maintain contact through a range of projected environments and situations. This is all done to give the space bot the best chance of successfully completing its mission. Even then, success cannot be guaranteed.
The children in our care are being prepared for a life filled with wonders and challenges that we haven’t yet thought possible in a future that will look very different from our past. Most of us were raised in a world where there was only one TV in the house and the phone was either in the hallway or the kitchen attached to the wall with a dangling, twisted cord. Madonna was cool. Mom and Dad wielded parenting skills they had gained over the previous two decades. They didn’t have Google in their pockets to answer our endless questions, but we still thought they were the smartest people on the planet. Now we are the parents raising our children with unparalleled access to knowledge and resources. Thanks to the Internet we have answers to all of their questions, except maybe the God- or multiverse-related ones. For the first few years we are the smartest people in the world to our children. After that they go straight to Professor Google and a panel of known and unknown peers.
Our generation found answers in the library or from magazines or teachers, parents and friends. Our friends were children we grew up with, whose parents knew our parents. We were all part of the same community, for better or worse. The environment that will shape our children is less tangible, harder to define and influence and more complex and interconnected than ours could ever have been. The nature of a ‘friend’ or trusted resource has also changed dramatically as virtual friends acquire the same status as the flesh and blood kind.
We are going where no parents have gone before. I know that I don’t have all the answers to my son’s questions and I don’t know how to make all his really big dreams come true. But I do have an idea of where to start.
This is not a book about being a good parent. I will assume that you are already the best parent you can be. I will also assume that your relationship with your child allows you to influence their life. That the basics are covered and your children are fed a balanced diet and clothed in Baby Gap (just kidding), kept safe in the care of qualified carers and, most importantly, loved as much as you could possibly love another human being. We cannot work together on their higher order thinking skills if their home base isn’t secure.
Families come in all different shapes, sizes and flavours: one mom and one dad, a single parent, two dads or two moms or any combination of these. Children are raised in homes with one, two or no working parents, with siblings or none. They are boys or girls, homosexual, bisexual or heterosexual sporting a variety of languages, races, religions and nationalities. I will refer to your child or children as him or her interchangeably and the family as any variation of the above. Parents will refer to a child’s primary caregiver or givers, related by birth, law or not at all.
We live in a diverse external world, but our internal worlds, drivers and cognitive motivations are astonishingly similar. That is why this book is written for boys and girls, moms, dads and caregivers from Kent to Kansas, Kenya to Korea and every stop in-between. It does not however, cover the complex cognitive worlds of special needs children.
Any voyage, especially one where the stakes are high and the destination is unchartered, must start with an objective. Once we know what the purpose of Operation Parenthood is, only then can we scope the mission. Do you, parent of (insert your child’s name here), have a very clear idea of the outcomes that you would like for your child? I’m not talking about whether you want little Xander to be a lawyer like his daddy or Anushree a microbiologist. No, what is your mission objective for their lives? Independence? Resilience? Bravery to go after their dreams or fulfil their potential despite limited opportunities? If you don’t know what gifts you want to impart to them throughout their childhood, then whatever the school system serves up on either side of their cafeteria lunches will have to be good enough, won’t it?
I asked parents from around the world what they wished for their children and here are some of the answers I received.
“That they grow up identifying their unique talents, skills, values and passions and choose to follow that in all areas.”
Jaime, Australia
“To be happy, kind, respectful, balanced and self assured.”
Maxine, South Africa
“To find confidence, love, commitment.”
Kelly, Indonesia
“Happiness, flow and resilience.”
Menakshi, India
“That they find something in life which they really enjoy and have a passion for. And don’t fill up with fear.”
Antonia, Buenos Aires
“To be brave and follow their dreams no matter what.”
Karl, Canada
I used to wonder how I would answer this question. In fact, I thought about it a lot. What did I want most of all for my son? Was it as simple as happiness or fulfilment or some other even less tangible quality? If so, how would I give him that? As with most mental conundrums, the answer came to me when I wasn’t thinking about it on a holiday in South Africa just after my son’s 8th birthday.
We spent a morning with a falconer along the aptly named Garden Route in the South. A mesmerising, befreckled, red-bearded old man who rehabilitates birds of prey that have been hurt or fallen on hard times, so to speak. Many of their species balancing on the brink of extinction with no government protection or funding to raise awareness of their plight. These birds are his all-consuming passion and love of his life. A life that is entirely funded by donations from the public. Is he doing a worthwhile job? Yes. Is he happy? Absolutely. But would I like my son to grow up doing something he loves that is entirely reliant on fickle hand-outs from tourists over a few summer months? Even if it makes him happy? Hmm.
Then I realised that it wasn’t happiness or resilience or even finding purpose that I truly wanted to gift him.
What I wanted most of all for my son was for him to learn to make the best possible decisions that he could. Be a good thinker and deliberately curate everything on the path leading to his future. Not simply follow the capricious current of life. Besides, my husband and I knew that the decisions we had made in the past had created our current reality, and the decisions that we made today would create our future. My son’s life would also be guided and determined by the choices he made along the way. Would that make him happy? We hoped so. We hoped that being able to make good decisions about how to spend his time, what to study, what to read, what not to eat or drink and how to respond to challenging situations in the playground, the campus or the office would make his life a little easier, and maybe, a little happier. The rest would be up to him. And if he chose to be a dreadlocked-bohemian-surfer dude, then at least it would have been a well-considered decision. I hope.
But how could we teach him to make good decisions? Did we even need to? Surely his school would teach him to be a good thinker? We soon found out that, even though school subjects were now considerably cooler than in our day, teaching students what to think is still their primary goal. Facts and data are easier to teach and test for. Are primary school teachers even familiar with decision science and critical thinking? Should they be? But were we in a position to teach him how to make good choices ourselves? We’d racked up a fair amount of lousy decisions between us in the past. So lecturing him in the art of decision science, or anything for that matter, would likely backfire before he hit puberty.
What we could do was learn as much as possible about making good decisions, thinking about thinking and processing information soundly. Then, and only then, could we coach him. In fact, this is how I came to do what I do as a coach and lecturer in critical thinking and decision making. It was all for my most precious little one – because I realised that I couldn’t raise a critical thinker if I wasn’t one myself.
Yes, I know, not everyone can devote a decade to thinking and writing about thinking (it’s been as cerebral and romantic as it sounds), which is why I have written Raising Thinkers as a guide to help you lay some solid cognitive foundations to set your children up for their journey of a lifetime.
So, mission architect, what was it that you wanted for your children? Write down your thoughts here, right now, so that you don’t forget. If you are reading an ebook, grab a pen and paper because you’ll need them again soon.
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As a behavioural economist and lecturer in critical thinking there is zero chance of me forecasting a future based on historical data – my crystal ball doesn’t work that well. Such predictions would come with a loud thumb-sucking sound and be as pointless as trying to call interest rates in the year 2025 (apologies to anyone who has). But this creates a conundrum for us – how can we understand the forces that will shape our children’s future environment and challenges with only historical and current data to work with? Couldn’t we rather just sit back and wash our hands of the whole future affair? Leave it to our child’s teachers/peers/latest YouTube idol to take care of till they turn 18 and we can tuck them into an escape pod and send them on their way.
This worked out all right for Superman’s parents back on planet Krypton. They didn’t have 18 years to prepare their son for launch but they did the best they could with what they had. Just before the destruction of their entire planet they snuggled their new born babe, Kal-El, into a nifty life-support capsule, set his path for Earth and hoped that he would land in loving arms. Wasn’t it lucky that he landed in a field, on a farm in a developed country where an elderly, kind and childless couple found him and raised him to be a caring citizen and indestructible superhero, capable only of exercising his powers for good? But what if he had landed in Syria, Siberia or the Congo? He would have needed a different set of skills to navigate his way to superhero status and global stardom. Could his parents even have imaged such a setting for his formative years? How are we supposed to prepare our greatest and most precious investment, our children, for a future that we can’t imagine?
By focusing on their journey, not the final destination, because their journey will create their destination.
To do this we can start with current information just like the teams at NASA. Information and insights that will help us anticipate a most likely range of environments and conditions that our children will encounter along their way. This will also allow us to model a series of obstacles they are most likely to face and equip them with the skills needed not just to overcome challenges but to thrive in a new, unknown world.
So let’s explore some fundamental features of the futures that we’ll be jettisoning our little darlings into. The skills that they will need in these settings and what can reasonably be expected from education systems across the East and West. We also ask what can reasonably be expected from us, the engineers of their future selves, given our mental frames and abilities.
I’ll end each chapter with a note on its key takeaways and thinking points. Hang on to these, they’ll be useful as your children grow and your parenting tactics evolve.
TIPS AND TAKEAWAYS FROM CHAPTER 1
1. What is the objective of Operation Parenthood for you? We all want different things for our children. Have you thought about the talents you would like to gift them throughout their childhood?
2. We can’t know the future that we are launching our children into, nor the jobs that will occupy them throughout their life but we can learn as much as possible about the trends likely to impact their journey through time and help them make informed choices about their future.