Note from Art: I don’t often write about parenting, but it is most definitely leadership…and you/we are most definitely responsible for raising tomorrow’s leaders. It’s time we stepped up our game a bit on diversity and global education.
As if parenting isn’t challenging enough for most of us, there’s another task to add to a list that doesn’t seem to lack for things to do. This one may require foregoing a few soccer games, conducting some more of those “talks” and putting the effort forth to create new educational opportunities and family experiences
I’m talking about ensuring that our future generations of leaders grow up globally aware and highly familiar with the rich and complicated level of diversity, customs, practices and subtle and significant variations across cultures, countries and religions.
Six Reasons Why this is Really Important?
- The last time I looked, everything that we understood as children of the 70’s and as parents of the 90’s children has changed. Our context is steeped in the world of our parents and of our youth. Tomorrow on this pale blue dot called earth does not look like yesterday.
- The global economy is more interconnected and infinitely more complex to navigate and compete in than ever before.
- The stakes for jobs, careers and even the prosperity of countries and regions are now very, very real.
- The world of work involves collaborating and cooperating and building bridges with people across cultures, religions and geographies. You must be a boundary and culture spanner to survive and succeed.
- The people your children will be both collaborating with and competing against are well-steeped in languages, cultural issues and understanding and they are most definitely aware of the opportunities. They are also aware of the relative ignorance of their American counterparts on these issues.
- The world of work involves identifying and successfully competing in far away places that don’t look like Most Towns, U.S.A. This requires insight, knowledge, context and skills that our parents would not understand.
The Problem: We Don’t Think Globally
Most of us…and especially our children have no context for where things come from…how they got there and what the implications are for the entire value chain backwards from the retailers to somewhere in the world where the materials and labor came together. We buy and consume mindless and heedless of our connection to a complex global economic value chain and ecosystem.
My observation is that there is a naïve idealism born of parental sheltering in some of our youth that life unfolds easily and predictably. You go to school, a good job waits for you on the other end and you exceed the life achievements of your parents. For a reality check, see also the note that everything changed.
An initial instinct is to point at our education system and wonder what they can do to solve this issue. School is an important part of the opportunity to improve, but the primary responsibilities for adding a global dimension to our children’s life experiences is ours as parents. Easy words, I know.
Seven Ideas for Helping Improve Your Child’s Global and Cultural I.Q.
1. Make a conscious effort to teach your children about the broader world at an early age. This transcends looking at maps and involves actually spending time studying different cultures and creating related experiences including trips to libraries, restaurants, museums and different types of cultural events. And yes, this means you might be challenged to learn yourself. Remember, you just need to stay one lesson ahead of your child.
2. Teach your children about economics and politics and help them stay abreast of current global events. Discuss these at the dinner table.
3. Encourage reading activities or create reading lists that draw on global authors and sources. Your librarian will be happy to help you with this.
4. Increase the emphasis on learning foreign languages (plural) at a young age. Don’t wait for 7th grade Spanish. There are resources available on the web or via other service providers and tutors. Yeah, this takes money and time. So do soccer, hockey, football, dance, music lessons etc.
5. If your financial conditions allow, skip the third trip to Disney and go somewhere that requires travelling over an ocean. Spend time reading and preparing for the visit and try to build an itinerary that includes something other than the usual tourist stops.
6. Host an exchange student. Better yet, do this several times.
7. At the right age, encourage your children to become exchange students or to take advantage of study abroad programs.
The Bottom-Line for Now
It’s easy to get lost in this big country and in our daily family lives in our communities and lose track of the world around us. It’s more important than ever to create a broader global consciousness in the minds of our children or they are in for a rough wake-up call. The distance from soccer field in Sometown, U.S.A. to expectant job seeker and erstwhile professional is very short, and global preparation is now a prerequisite for survival and success.
I totally agree with your post Art, Its time we all realized that we have to be more than product consumers. We have some real completion coming our way from abroad and we better be prepared. The world is flat.
We are in global agreement, Bob! Thanks for reading and commenting. -Art
Art,
I think you hit on the most important change that has taken place in the economic world. People forget that the basis of capitalism is the balance of capital and labor. From 1945 to 1989, the capitalist world was Western Europe, the US, Canada, Japan and Australia. By 1989 there was a pool of capital and a pool of labor (maybe 700 million).
In on Nov 9, 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and the equation changed. Today, there are 3.7 billion or so labors competing on the same field for the pool capital. Yes the pool of capital has increased, but it has gone to the wealthy in the western world and the poor in the rest of the world. That it has gone to the poor, those living in abject poverty, is a fantastic thing. Abject poverty meaning living on less than $1 a day. It is a truly amazing thing that we may never have more than a billion people living under $1 a day.
In America, there are very few people living in abject poverty. Maybe the homeless in America fall into that category, but I suspect not. Living on less than $1 a day means that if someone in your immediate family catches of cold or gets sick, someone in your immediate family will die. Maybe not the person whose sick, but someone in the immediate family.
The fact that the percentage and even the absolute number of people living under $1 a day is decreasing is probably the single greatest feat of our time. That and the fact that major powers have not been at war in seventy years. Those are really the great successes of the modern world.
The wealth (the top 3% or so, or those earning over about $250K for a family) have done well. The top .2% have done fantastically well. But this gain has really come at the expense of the other 97% of people in America.
Its wonderful that the rest of the world is rising and at peace. America is probably the number one reason for that. However, for kids starting out, a lot of jobs that existed in America between 1945 and 89 won’t be there. Baring something catastrophic, they won’t have 700 mm people they’re competing against, they’ll have 3.something billion or more.
There will be lots of opportunities, but following the crowd won’t get it done.
Bravo, Art! I couldn’t agree with these sentiments more. As an American expat, I’m often dismayed by how insular American culture is. It would absolutely benefit the US (and everyone else!) if more parents took on these ideas so that they could impress on their children the importance of understanding the global economy, why we can’t simply project our own ideas on other cultures, and why we should make an effort to truly understand them before judging them!
Hi, Art. Couldn’t agree with you more! A globally-minded friend and I have started a blog which addresses some of these issues. We both strive to bestow a multi-lingual education upon our children, as well as a true understanding and appreciation of other cultures. We started the blog to share these ideas and to encourage others to do the same. Great article!
Jill, thanks for writing. Kudos on the blog start-up! -Art