When I was pregnant with my first child, my husband and I were having an in length discussion about what skills we would like to teach our child. 

While being an educationist guiding other people’s children is so rewarding and joyful, it really gets pressuring when you have to take decisions on teaching your own child. I started feeling like I wasn’t reading enough books or doing enough research, and as he grew a month older, I felt like if I don’t dwell deeper into the subject I’ll miss his learnings for that particular month.

While I was learning more about early childhood education, I came across a concept in one of Steiner’ s books, that children and specially babies should be surrounded with soothing colours. It takes them a while to get grounded to earth, so they derive more comfort from soft pastel colors. He also talked about how when they start exploring their senses, of touch and sight, we should introduce them to different natural textures, silk, cotton, wood etc. By the time I learnt this, my son was 4 months old, and by the time I could make time and gather some peach silk cloths to play with, he was 4.5 months old. I had this sinking feeling that I had lost some time to introduce this experience to him. I was a little late.

Now I know that I can apply this on every other child that comes my way, so it gives me comfort. But honestly being an educationist takes a toll on me, while raising my own child cause I want to apply everything I already know or get to know in the future on him.

When I see the parents and children in my workshops I realise that, parents are facing this dilemma always, every day, every month, every year, trying to teach as much as they can to their children before they grow older, before it’s too late, hoping that when the time comes, they know what they are required to know and they have enough skills to live in the world.
 
The bigger question here is, What are these skills? and how do we know what skills our children will require a decade or 2 from now? With the advent of AI and with everything getting automated, what are the skills that humans would need? We can already see that things we learnt when we were in school are being done by computers now. I spent a whole summer learning html and web designing, and now anyone can design a website using platforms like WordPress without any of that knowledge. Anyway I don’t think we can predict what skills will our children require when they grow up but I know one thing. We should be focusing on teaching our children to be humans first and not computers. We are already building machines and computers with inanimate objects, let’s not use our children for that.

We decided that we will make sure that our son learns to be empathetic, learns to face challenges, is able to work in harmony and constructively with people around him.

Can you think of such skills that we should be teaching our children to prepare them for the future? Skills that will stay with them and prepare them, no matter how the world changes and what the future is.

Mridula Saria
Co-founder -Grooming Tales / Mentor
Educational Researcher and Coach