What the World Economic Forum’s Top Future Skills Actually Mean For Kids (Practical Parenting Tips)
Last Saturday, I wiped sticky chocolate off my kitchen counter while my 10-year-old Mia and her friend Lila leaned over the mixing bowl, frowning. They’d forgotten baking soda, the dough was so runny it spread halfway across the tray when they spooned it out. Mia’s first move was to scrape the whole thing into the trash and grab the pre-made tube I keep for emergencies. Lila stopped her. She pointed to the half-opened bag of oat flour on the shelf, said we’d used it for muffins the week before, it was thick enough to soak up the extra butter. Ten minutes of stirring and a handful of extra chocolate chunks later, they shoved lumpy cookie dough bars into the oven and plopped down on the floor to wait for the dog to drop a crumb.
I was sitting there drinking coffee, and I remembered the article I’d scrolled through the night before, the one that listed the World Economic Forum’s top future skills kids need to get jobs in the next 10 years. I’d stared at that list for five minutes, thinking what on earth am I supposed to do with this? It sounded like a list of talking points for corporate leadership retreats, not something I can fit into a week of school drop-offs and piano practice and remembering to pack goldfish for snack. I was already falling behind on getting Mia into a beginner coding camp, I thought, how am I supposed to teach all this extra stuff too?
But I watched those two girls on my kitchen floor, tossing ideas back and forth about how many sprinkles to add, and I realized that was the list right there. Creative problem solving, flexibility, teamwork, the whole set of skills that sit at the top of WEF’s rankings — it wasn’t something they learned in a $500 summer program. It was what they just did when the cookies went wrong.
A month before that, Mia came home from school upset about her group rainforest project. One kid forgot his half of the research, another wanted to make a short TikTok instead of the static poster the teacher asked for. Mia told me the whole thing was ruined, she wanted to just do the entire project by herself after dinner, so she could get a good grade. My first instinct was to write a quick email to the teacher, explain the situation, or just sit down and help her outline the whole thing to get it over with. I didn’t want her to get a bad grade because of other people’s mistakes. But I’d already been turning that WEF list over in my head, so I just asked her what her group had already talked about trying.
She said they thought they could print the missing research at lunch the next day, and add the TikTok as an extra on top of the poster. The teacher had said extra credit was allowed for creative additions, right? I just nodded, and said that sounds like a solid plan. She ended up getting an A, and came home talking about how much fun they had filming the video of their model sloth. It wasn’t perfect, but it was theirs.
A lot of parents I know are stressing right now about preparing kids for the future. We sign them up for every extra class we can afford, we worry that if they don’t check every box, they’ll get left behind. But when you actually look at WEF’s top 10 skills, most of them aren’t technical. They’re the stuff that gets built in the messy, boring moments of everyday life, not in a classroom with a fancy curriculum.
I started doing one small thing a few months ago, it takes no extra time, no extra money. When my kid comes to me with a problem that isn’t dangerous, I pause 10 seconds before I offer to fix it. I just say, “What do you think you can try first?” That’s it. If they’re stuck on a Lego build and can’t find the right piece, I don’t dig through the bin for them. I ask what they have that could work instead. If their drawing gets a smudge right before they finish it, I don’t hand them a new sheet of paper. I ask what they can turn that smudge into. Half the time, they come up with something way more interesting than what I would have done.
It doesn’t work every time. Last month, Mia spent 45 minutes trying to fix her bike chain after it slipped off the gear, and she still couldn’t get it. We ended up loading it into the car and taking it to the shop anyway. But on the drive over, she was talking about what she tried that didn’t work, why she thinks it wouldn’t stay put. That’s still learning, isn’t it? I still mess up too. Last week, she was wrapping a birthday present for her grandma and the packing tape kept sticking to itself, and I almost reached over to take it from her before I remembered. She ended up using washi tape and wrapping it in old comic book paper, and it looked way cooler than anything I would have wrapped.
I still worry sometimes, same as every other parent. I don’t know what jobs will be around when Mia is my age, I don’t know if I’m doing enough. But that Saturday with the cookie bars made me stop panicking about all the fancy classes I can’t afford, or all the boxes I think I need to check. The future skills everyone talks about aren’t some special thing you have to go out and get. They’re built when you let kids work through the small messes, instead of cleaning them up before they even get a chance to try. We pulled the cookie bars out of the oven that day, they were a little lumpy, a little more oat than cookie, but they tasted fine. No one got an award, nothing life-changing happened. It was just a Saturday, and two girls figuring it out as they went. That’s all it really is, isn’t it?
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