A Conversation With Celebrated Futurist Dr. Parag Khanna - Insights On Getting Kids Ready for A World of Migration
As camps close for lack of staff, what's going on with teens & summer employment?
Issue: 6
Thanks so much for reading!
Here's what caught my parenting eyes this week:
Top of The List: As camps close for lack of staff, what's going on with teens & summer employment?
Camp demand roared back this year, with some 26 million children nationwide expected to be enrolled in one of the over 15,000 summer camps in the country. But worker shortages are forcing camps to trim or cancel programs - because the teenagers that have traditionally been the staff aren't there.
Only a third of teenagers have summer jobs this summer, mainly due to the pressure to focus on academic activities and enrichment experiences that seem more likely to get them into a more competitive college. Teenagers spend much more time studying in summer school or focused on volunteer hours and SAT prep. It's both understandable and unfortunate.
As Pamela Paul shares in Sunday's New York Times, summer jobs teach so many valuable career and life lessons - from the critical realization that being good at school doesn't mean being good at work, that not everyone is as lucky as you and that the summer job is often the first time kids get the chance to independently work with people who aren't like them and come from different backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences. All way more valuable than padded-up volunteer hours.
New Take = Better Outcome: Shifting away from “having a best friend” helps kids get ready for the future of work
It used to be that making sure your child had a "best friend" was one of the best ways for them to get through the ups and downs of school life. The "best friend" is an idealized relationship—Harry Potter with Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. Anne of Green Gables had Diane, and in the global phenomenon that is The Diary of A Wimpy Kid series, Greg Heffley, a middle-school social climber, always has the hapless but trustworthy Rowley Jefferson to fall back on when things get complicated. But thinking about what our kid's career and life structures will be like, this may no longer be the best way to help prepare them for what's ahead.
The data shows that, more likely than not that our kids will be freelancing–on contract, part-time, and self-employed. And in a gig economy (and in the broader labor force that's taking more cues from it), the ability to constantly cultivate and regenerate new professional networks is paramount.
By starting to deliberately shift away from the idea that good social relationships should be exclusive and focused on just one person and instead encouraging looser and more casual friendships, we can help kids to:
Adapt to multiple audiences
Enlarge their sense of what they can do and how they can do it
Develop their style of managing their relationships
Become genuinely comfortable with and enjoy the company of lots of different kinds of people
Read on in: "How To Raise Kids Who Thrive In The New Economy"
The LongRange: Celebrated futurist Dr. Parag Khanna - Insights On Getting Kids Ready for A World of Migration
"As climate change tips toward a full-blown crisis, economies collapse, governments destabilize, and technology disrupts, we're entering a new age of mass migration. It will scatter both the dispossessed and the well-off - and, as today's world population, which includes four billion restless youth, votes with their feet, what map of human geography will emerge?" says Dr. Parag Khanna in his latest book, "Move: The Forces Uprooting Us."
"Mass migrations are inevitable. More than ever, they are necessary. In the coming decades, entire overpopulated regions of the world might be abandoned, while some depopulated territories may gain massively in population and become new civilizational centers. If you are lucky enough to be somewhere you do not have to migrate—such as Canada or Russia—then migrants are coming your way. To paraphrase Lenin: You may not be interested in migration, but migration is interested in you."
After his recent talk at The Battery Club, I had the chance to chat with Parag (a father of two) about helping our kids be able to thrive against this emerging and shifting global landscape, one that that's going to be defined by at scale movement and migration at a pace and intensity that, we've never before experienced.
As always, my goal here is to find the tactics and frameworks that can help get your kids better prepared for their emerging future, with a few small nudges or iterations that fit into our lives reality. Against the themes that Move surfaces, here's what you can do:
Get Globally Interested.
Cultivate an enthusiastic interest in the larger world. This can happen with family travel, school foreign exchanges, or camps - also, check out if where you live has a twin city exchange that you can take part in.Consume Globally: Watch international news and global cultural content - from books, podcasts, Korean soap operas, or (my favorite as a kid) glossy magazines from other countries. The goal here is points of interest and connection, so your kids are actively looking to understand other people's lives regardless of where you live and how much travel is possible.
Focus on Food: Always one of the best ways to cultivate interest in anything. Eat out and order intentionally. Food is a motivator, so use it to have the family watch or read something linked to the country or culture. International food Instagram and Tik Tok are fantastic on this front.
Mental Wellness. Our kids are heading into a world where change and disruption will be the norm. Unfamiliarity causes stress. So help your children learn the habits and patterns that will help them stay grounded and feel good against significant changes because their lives will be made up of many. It feels like everything leads back to getting our kids to have regular meditation and mental wellness practices.
Have a question or angle I should have asked about, drop me a DM:@TheLongRange
On-Point & Interesting:
"But I also think there's a lot of value in saying, "Hey, a lot of work you're going to end up doing in your life is pointless, so why not just get used to it?" Why The movement to end homework is wrong (NYT)
"Don't stop tantrums with candy, demonize sex or force kids to finish their food." There's value in some experience crowdsourcing, and this one, based on top comments on Reddit, is totally on point. "The Parenting Tips That Might Sound Smart, But Are Toxic."
The LongRange is a curated community of parents, educators, and leaders having a much-needed conversation on parenting in the age of mass disruption.