What you have to teach your child for a future full of technology | Talent

Parents, you know, care about everything in regards to their children. In recent years, the media has taken care that robots are one of them. There are experts who believe half of the jobs can be automated. Since we are spending money on their education, how can we ensure that they will be able to develop a successful career and, more importantly, to enjoy a better life?

You have heard a thousand times the need to encourage creativity in your children. Artificial intelligence is able to solve problems in a methodical way. It is not so good, however, when it comes to connecting two complicated ideas. It is more intuitive and better in persuasive tasks. A) Yes, the environment and curiosity can stimulate, and much, creativity, a feature that can make an employee indispensable.

"I think what made Albert Einstein, Franklin, Steve Jobs and of course, Leonardo da Vinci were creative was that they were able to be curious about all kinds of things: they loved both art and science, both the humanities and engineering and technology. That's why I love creative people who can be placed at the intersection between different types of subjects, "he recently told EL PAÍS RETINA. Walter Isaacson, president in the last 14 years of The Aspen Institute. "In this somewhat unstable and unforeseeable situation, feel curiosity and not fear for the environment becomes a competitive advantage", Explains the occupational psychologist Elisa Sánchez.

• Learn from mistakes

Children tend to learn more than their parents do, not what they say. Therefore, it is important that they are witnesses of parents who show a capacity to learn and admit their own mistakes.

We are constantly wrong, but that does not necessarily have to be fatal. The really bad thing is that very often we are not even aware of these mistakes. We can be fooled by our senses or our biases (read this great piece about the companions of Verne) Or we get carried away by what our environment or people who think similarly think. For Kathryn Schulz, author of In defense of error, doubting about our certainties drives "curiosity, possibility and wonder". It is an active and investigative question, and it encourages us to leave our comfort zone. "

• Propose family games and encourage him to carry out team activities

If a human being can be more creative than a machine, imagine two ... or 100. Working as a team is going to be a more than likely need in their future work. And the best way to develop this practice is through family games and encourage children to carry out group activities of all kinds.

He will not have any choice. Some scientists have said that the average human being has a memory of around one gigabyte. Much less than a medium pendrive. Ignorance is a fact among human beings, even within the areas in which we are experts and what we do not use in our day to day we forget it. The process of digital transformation and increasing complexity of society only aggravates this situation, as they argue Steven SlomanPhilip Fernbach in his recent book The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone.

The solution, therefore, is to divide the cognitive tasks, those that have to do with knowledge. It is impossible to handle all the tasks of a complex process such as an operation, work in a laboratory, architecture studies, telecommunications companies or in the most basic of startups. Or even in movies like Cube.

• Develop your emotional intelligence

Helping children to identify, express and manage their emotions is not only key to facing a changing work environment. Also to enjoy a full life, by the way. Harvey Deutschendorf, author of The Other Kind of Smart: Simple Ways to Boost Your Emotional Intelligence for Greater Personal Effectiveness and Success, proposes in this article talk about characters from movies and series or encourage them to talk about how their day has gone and what setbacks have been found in them. What brings us to ...

• Teach them to manage their failures and frustrations

Authors like Eckhart Tolle tell us in his work that what we are is not given by what we have or the successes that we are capable of achieving. However, many times it is overlooked that many of the successful people we meet share a common trait: they understand that a failure does not diminish them as people and does not diminish their potential when it comes to reaching new goals. Some of the advice that the specialists propose to achieve it happen because the child Do what you can do, even if you do it slowly and badly, do not make up for the mistake by assuming the task, do not let it face what it is not ready for, no minimitate or cancel the crying, be empathetic (listen to their reasons and try to talk about emotions, how they feel), or give them the right help and when they ask for it.

• Teach them to love reading

Harvey Deutschendorf it points to a virtue that a future worker resistant to robots must have: to read. " Barry Zuckerman, a professor at the Boston University School of Medicine, ensures that children who are exposed to books from an early age perform better in a greater number of categories: they have a greater vocabulary, more, they pay more attention, they concentrate better and they are better prepared for their access to the nursery. "

The ability to learn new things, set new goals (and achieve them) also gives children a dose of confidence that they will do well if they access leadership positions in their adult lives, says Deutschendorf.