7 Future Skills You can Build while Your Kids are Home

A lot of my friends and clients are suddenly dealing with having their kids at home. With schools and kindergartens closing, many parents — often already overwhelmed with having to shift to remote working themselves — are struggling with what to do with the little ones.

So how do you keep kids busy, so you can actually focus on work?

And not just “keep them busy”, but support them in building essential skills and capacities for a volatile and uncertain future?

1. Connecting to Embodiment and Health

Exercise or do Yoga together

Since exercise is a great tool to stay calm and healthy in these times, and you would want to get your load of it, why not include your kids in the activity? While it is important alone time, it can also be alone time together, and this way you make sure you provide your kids with the appropriate exercise they are not getting while at home.

Once they are seeing you do these things, and you explain to them why you are doing it, they are more likely to adopt this healthy habit for themselves.

When they do, exercise will also become an activity you can suggest to them to do alone while you have to work.

There are even fun Yoga for kids videos. Here are two example channels:

• https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5uIZ2KOZZeQDQo_Gsi_qbQ
• https://www.youtube.com/user/barikoral

Cook together

Many children are used to ready made food. This is a great opportunity to change that and learn about food and cooking (together):

• Explore different dietary systems like in Ayurveda
• Check out where ingredients are from, how they are grown, learn about the countries of origin and their agricultural and cultural practices
• Learn about chemicals in food and what they do — their good and bad
• Learn about chemical reactions that are happening when things get mixed, emulsified, cooked, fried, baked
• Show your kids cutting techniques for chopping etc. (i.e. put them to work and learn safe handling of knives at the same time)

You can have them look up things (e.g. on https://www.kiddle.co/) and engage in these activities while you prepare the meal (or even let them do it, if they are old enough). This gives you some space, and at the same time you do things together.

Take in the meal consciously together, i.e. without media, so you can focus on your food. Meals in silence are also a nice break from a day full of activity.

2. Build the Emotional Intelligence of Your Child

Emotional Intelligence is one of the key capacities for a future when robots and AI take over much of the physical and intellectual work.

The best way to teach emotional intelligence, of course, is by living it yourself and teaching by example.

Thanks to it becoming more mainstream in the last years, there are also a ton of resources out there. Here are a few:

• https://imaginationsoup.net/emotional-intelligence-activities-kids/
• https://bigeqcampaign.org/2018/05/03/5-fun-games-to-play-with-your-kids-to-boost-their-eq/
• And if you (or someone around you) think emotional intelligence is for “sissies” — here are some resources from the Ohio National Guard: (Ages 5–7 https://www.ong.ohio.gov/frg/FRGresources/emotional_activities_5-7.pdf and ages 8–10 https://www.ong.ohio.gov/frg/FRGresources/emotional_intellegence_8-10.pdf)

3. Strengthen their Mental Intelligence

When most people hear intelligence, they think of IQ, of the mental intelligence that allows us to see patterns in symbols and manipulate them. Also, we think of that as static, as a genetic lottery, but research has shown that mental intelligence can be built and influenced.

One key element in that is the idea of a Growth Mindset.

Building a Growth Mindset

Here is an entire Lesson Plan on helping your child develop a Growth Mindset by Khan Academy (which just in case you don’t know about it, is an amazing resource as such): https://www.khanacademy.org/resources/parents-mentors-1/helping-your-child/a/growth-mindset-lesson-plan.

Here are also a few more:

• 4 Week Guide: How to Teach Growth Mindset to Kids (4-week guide) — Big Life Journal.pdf
• Brain Exercises: https://www.mentalup.co/brain-training-with-brain-exercises

Do a Research Project

Let them use their brain, pick a topic that interests them, and collect material over several days. Let them create a book, a website or an exhibition on the topic.

Learning how to Code

In addition, this is a great opportunity to teach your kids how to code. One of the key things I learned as a child was coding. It shaped my capacity for logic and how I look at the world.

There are quite a few offerings out there for kids to learn coding, one of the most popular ones is MIT’s Scratch: https://scratch.mit.edu/

There are also a ton of coding (and other) classes for kids on Youtube and some of the bigger educational platforms like Udemy, EdX or Coursera.

In today’s world, there is no excuse for not learning.

4. Connect with Community

Physical distancing is not the same as social distancing. On the contrary, this is a great time to reach out and touch someone. Especially a lot of elders are isolated at the moment — even more so than often already the case.

Interviewing Elders

One beautiful activity you can do is to connect your kids with elders in your community, whether family or extended via friends or neighbors. If they are technology savvy enough to use a smart phone, tablet or PC, they can video chat, otherwise, there is that 19th century technology called phone.

Have your kids connect and interview elders. Create profiles and storybooks. This allows elders to feel connected, gives them an opportunity to share of themselves and their experiences, creates generational learning, and provides valuable insights for your children.

It also teaches them how to interview someone (here is a lovely video on that and a bit outdated tip sheet)

Document Your Family Tree

Connected to interviewing elders is the exercise of creating a family tree. It allows kids to get a sense of root, of history, of longevity of life. Remembering that life goes on provides additional psychological safety in times of transformation.

Here are some activities to that end: https://buggyandbuddy.com/9-family-tree-activities-for-kids/)

Both interviews and family tree exercises help your kids in learning to interview and ask good questions, be attentive and listen, and synthesize information.

5. Creative Expression

One of the best tools for young and old to process transformation is to express. Since the advent of time, humans have used creative expression to process emotions.

Create an Autobiography

Let your kids create their autobiography. No matter how old they are, no matter what format. This can be written, drawn, audio or video recordings. Let them think about their favorite moments so far and teach them the tools to capture it.

Create an Opera

In part, Opera (and later Wagner’s notion of the “Gesamtkunstwerk”) was invented to bring together the various different lively arts of the time to create a transformation experience for the audience. This makes for a lovely longer term project that can keep them busy for a while, and be developed over a week or two.

Have your kids create an opera production that includes the seven lively arts:

• Architecture — Have them build the stage background (can be blankets, cardboard boxes etc). Look up theaters, amphitheaters, learn about stages and how sound travels — obviously this will probably be a section of your living room, and might even be in your bathtub given the space you might have available, but even there, kids can learn valuable lessons.
• Painting — Have them draw or paint some scenic backgrounds for the production. Butcher paper works great (while you can get it), otherwise some old sheets can do as well.
• Sculpture — Create requisites and the things that might be needed as physical objects. Whittle, ducktape, papermache, there are a thousand ways that can teach your child hand-eye coordination.
• Storytelling — Have them write an engaging story with Opening Act, Middle and End. It is a great opportunity to teach them about dramatic form and dramatic arc, hero’s journey and similar arcs, about character development, archetypes. And about finding something they care about, some purpose that makes an interesting story. For younger kids, you can story board this rather than write. This is a great way for them to process emotional experiences — even the current one.
• Acting — Taking on roles, playing to be someone else, is a more natural thing for kids to do than for many adults, who have become locked in a cage of identity. Acting out different roles allows the kid to take on different perspectives, trains them in empathy and extending their horizon. They can also play multiple roles in the opera (since you might not have enough children around for a whole cast).
• Music — Of course, this might interrupt your work from home scenario a bit (hence the bathtub suggestion earlier), but musical education is key for the development of children. If you can noise control, this is a great time to learn a musical instrument or come up with songs for the musical.
• Dancing — Since your children will not have much exercise, dancing is a great alternative. In addition, creating a choreography requires some dedication and coordination. Fortunately, again, the internet saves the day. Dance has massively evolved since the advent of social media, and this also poses a great opportunity to teach them about that history.

6. Teach them how to Meditate

Many kids today rarely learn to simply be. In a world of constant stimulation (and watching and mimicking their parents with regard to their use of cell phones and social media), it is easy to be hyper-active.

While in some very special cases this indeed might warrant medication, a good first step might be to actually teach children stillness — and once they got into it, it will be a great opportunity for reprieve for you ;-)

Meditation has shown to improve cognitive functioning and intelligence in children among many other benefits.

Here are a few resources:

• Guided meditations for kids Headspace: https://www.headspace.com/meditation/kids /
• https://www.youtube.com/user/NewHorizonHolistic
• https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfZ0jscxj3Fm_Xt2hv7Z3Xw

7. Create Visions for possible Futures

Nobody knows what the future will look like. Even futurists can only look at dynamics and scenarios. So why not let your kid imagine future scenarios?

Imagination and visioning is a key skill for the future.

One fun exercise they can engage in are to create Vision Boards. Using old magazines (or electronic pictures), have them create a collage Vision Board of what they can see for the future. This can be generic for the world, or specific (e.g. your next vacation). Of course, they can also draw or paint it.

Tap into that genius and see what they will come up with. Their visions might surprise you, and in the meantime they are exercising one of the most precious human qualities:

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”
-Albert Einstein

It is an Investment in the Future

Key to all of these activities, of course, is your initial engagement. Consider it a replacement for your commuting time. It will take some investment of your time to actually kick off some of these activities — and more so to model how you engage in these activities. If you engage with curiosity, learning, a growth mindset, and with a sense of exploring together, it will be much easier to get your kids on board. Eventually, that will buy you some free time to get to work as well.

In the meantime, think about it as a gift that you get to spend time with them. When you are back in the office or back to traveling for work one day, looking at their pictures on your desk or on your phone, you will be grateful for these moments together.

Many of these capacities are not taught in school, and since they are direly needed in a VUCA future, use this opportunity to lay the foundation for their future education.

If not now, then when?

Disclaimer: While I have studied transformational psychology and child development, I don’t have children myself — nor do many of your kids’ teachers, so there is that ;-) The suggestions above range in terms of age group, but can all be adopted to suit their developmental level.