What are the top future skills kids need? Practical everyday ways to build them at home
Last Saturday, I stood at my kitchen sink wiping melted popsicle juice off the counter while three 10-year-olds argued on the living room rug over a half-built Lego rocket. One had pulled the wrong set of instructions off Amazon. The second had glued a fin on backwards. The third, my son, was red-faced and threatening to dump the whole bin in the trash. Mia, my kid’s 4th grade teacher who’d stopped by to drop off a birthday gift, leaned against the doorframe and laughed, then said, “If you read that World Economic Forum future skills list everyone’s talking about, this exact moment is three out of the top 10.”
I’d only seen the list shared on LinkedIn by my former college roommates who work in corporate HR, full of terms I assumed mattered more for 30-year-olds changing jobs than elementary school kids. I wiped my hands on my jeans and joined her on the porch, where she pulled up the list on her phone. I was surprised to see coding and data analysis weren’t at the very top. The first several skills were things like creative problem-solving, collaboration, flexibility, and the ability to bounce back when things go wrong.
I was already reaching for my shoes to go in and fix the rocket argument when Mia stopped me. A lot of parents she talks to see this list and immediately think they need to sign their kid up for a new after-school class or buy fancy workbooks to check these skills off a list. Last year, I’d done exactly that: I paid $300 for a summer coding camp because I’d read over and over that tech skills were the only future that mattered. My son spent the whole week drawing Minecraft comics in the back of the room and quit on the fourth day. I wrote it off as him being lazy, but Mia said that’s not the point. These skills aren’t built in structured classrooms. They’re built in messy, unplanned moments like a broken Lego rocket.
We stayed on the porch for 10 minutes, listening to the yelling die down. First, one of the boys suggested they just look up a picture of the rocket online. When the Wi-Fi cut out (our neighborhood service goes out every time it rains, which it does a lot here), they remembered my son had an old space comic book with the exact rocket they wanted to build on the cover. They traced the dimensions from the page, made their own hand-drawn instructions, and cut the badly glued fin off with a plastic butter knife to reposition it. By the time we walked back in, they were flying the rocket across the couch, chattering about how their instructions were better than the store-bought ones anyway.
That moment stuck with me, so I went back and read through the full WEF list later that night. Almost all of the top skills are soft, behavioral ones that you can’t test on a quiz or teach through a worksheet. What’s more, you don’t need any extra money or time to help kids build them. You just have to adjust small, daily habits.
For example, I started doing this one small thing when my kids come to me with a problem: I make them name two possible solutions before I say anything. If they’re fighting with a sibling over screen time, they can’t just come to me to pick a winner. They have to come up with two ways to split the time, and we pick from there. If they’re stuck on a homework problem, I don’t give them the step-by-step. I ask them what they tried already, and what two other approaches they could think of. It takes five extra minutes most of the time, and it’s way less work than fixing every problem for them in the long run.
Another thing I started doing is letting them plan one low-stakes family activity a month with a set budget. Last month, my son got $50 to plan our Saturday. He picked a free hike at the county park, bought popsicles and trail mix at the dollar store, and had $38 left over to put toward a new Lego set. He had to adjust when the trail he wanted to hike was closed for maintenance, and he picked a different trail that ended up having a better view. That one afternoon checked off creative thinking, flexibility, problem-solving, all things at the top of that WEF list.
It doesn’t always go well. Last month, my son had a group social studies project where one member didn’t do any of the work he promised. My son came home moping, and I almost emailed his teacher to complain before I remembered our rule. He came up with three options: do the missing work for him, tell the teacher, or talk to the group member after class and rearrange the work to play to his strengths. He picked the third option, and the kid still only turned in half of his part. They got a B instead of the A my son wanted, and he was upset for a night. But the next day he told me he’d rather get a B doing it his way than have me fix it for him.
I still step in too early sometimes. Last week, I was tired after work and just solved my daughter’s math homework problem for her because I wanted to get to dinner on time. She rolled her eyes and told me I broke our rule. I still think it’s good for kids to learn math and coding and other hard skills, don’t get me wrong. But it’s starting to sink in that those won’t do them much good if they can’t work through a problem that doesn’t have a clear answer, or get along with people who don’t do things the way they want, or bounce back when the instructions they have are wrong.
No one knows what jobs kids will have in 20 years, anyway. All we can do is build the habits that will serve them no matter what they end up doing. It’s messy, and I get it wrong more often than I get it right, but so far, it’s working a lot better than that $300 coding camp ever did.
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