Raising Can-Do Kids: Giving Children the Tools to Thrive in a Fast-Changing World - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Richard Rende, Ph.D., is a developmental psychologist, researcher, educator, and consultant. As a research professor at Brown University, he led many large-scale scientific projects on child development and parenting and served in multiple academic leadership roles. Rende distills scientific findings for parents and policy makers as a writer and speaker, and his work has been featured in Parents.com, Parenting.com, the Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Yahoo!, CNN, MSNBC, Time.com, ABC News, and NPR.
 
Jen Prosek is the founder and CEO of Prosek Partners, among the largest independent public relations firms in the United States. As a successful entrepreneur, Prosek is passionate about promoting entrepreneurship and her book, Army of Entrepreneurs, provides a roadmap for businesses seeking to make their own organizations and employees more entrepreneurial.

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INTRODUCTION

Before we launch you into this book, we think it would be helpful to tell you a little about how it came about. In 2012, one of us—Jen, a successful entrepreneur—contacted the other of us—Richard, a child development researcher—to explore partnering on a book. Our conversation, however, quickly turned into a discussion of the uncertainty we were both feeling as parents. While we all want to raise our kids to be “successful”—is there a more ubiquitous phrase these days when it comes to kids?—both personally and professionally, it’s just not clear how we should do that, because the world our kids will enter someday is becoming increasingly unpredictable.

We talked about some of the basic concerns we keep hearing about. Kids can have the most outstanding academic and extracurricular profile imaginable and still get rejected by a lot of colleges, as the number of applicants keeps growing while the number of available slots doesn’t change much. They can have an Ivy League degree and not get the job they want, and a college degree certainly doesn’t guarantee immediate employment. If they do manage to land that job, they might find that it’s either going to morph in unpredictable ways, or that it may even disappear. If the social scientists are right, we are fast becoming a nation of free agents who bear full responsibility for engineering our careers and our lives. The availability of good jobs and fulfilling careers won’t be a given for the rising generation. Many of today’s most prestigious companies and professions won’t even exist. How do we prepare our kids for that?

Jen related that, given present-day conditions, she wanted her daughter to learn throughout childhood the skills she would need to successfully navigate the world’s unpredictability. It seemed less important that her daughter know about a specific field or notch a specific credential; rather, she needed to build skills such as adapting, improvising, learning, persevering, and spotting opportunities. We agreed that the old paradigms of parenting for success are becoming increasingly obsolete. If we want our kids to thrive in that unpredictable world that awaits them as adults, we can’t just hyperfocus on pushing them as hard as possible through the predictable path of schoolwork, exams, and extracurricular activities. There has to be something more we can do to prepare them for a future that we can’t entirely envision.

Jen suspected that raising kids to become more like entrepreneurs would help. Entrepreneurs typically make their way in the world with no road map to guide them; they must motivate and inspire themselves, applying their passion and creativity to create success for themselves and value for others. People had often asked Jen if her parents had done anything special in raising her and her brother, since both had gone on to work for themselves (Jen as the founder and CEO of an international communications business, her brother as an independent artist and writer). The more Jen thought about it, the more she realized that she and her brother had been encouraged at home to do things like explore, be creative, be optimistic, seek out opportunities, make their own choices, and know how to get along with others. Jen realized that the very skills and outlook she experienced as a child were exactly the strengths she brought to her business and the capabilities she wanted to instill in her daughter. It wouldn’t matter whether or not her daughter eventually wanted to become an entrepreneur—rather, her thinking was that she would be well equipped to pursue her own successes by being entrepreneurial.

Jen put it to Richard: Was it reasonable to think that parents could help their kids cultivate entrepreneurial skills? And was Jen right in thinking that cultivation of entrepreneurial skills would benefit all kids, even those who didn’t particularly aspire to start their own companies or pursue business careers?

Richard agreed that Jen’s thinking resonated when we think about kids growing up right now. He had enjoyed a long career as an academic developmental psychologist and educator, having conducted many studies on how the family environment influences children’s development. From a scientific standpoint, what he liked about Jen’s approach was that it was “road tested”—it was demonstrably true that entrepreneurs gravitate to and thrive in a changing, unscripted world. Further, entrepreneurs tend to do what they love and pursue professional success—essentially the goal that all parents have for their kids. Richard knew from his previous work that the kinds of entrepreneurial skills Jen was thinking of were realistically attainable for all kids, and that you didn’t have to be a budding “business type” to benefit from them. He believed, as Jen did, that parents can’t definitely assure their children’s future happiness and success, and they can’t assume that the world will prove a hospitable place either. What they can do is give their kids the strongest possible platform so that kids can do for themselves—now, tomorrow, and decades from now. That “can-do” spirit was exactly what kids today will need to take on uncertainty to create their own success.

Jen proposed that she and Richard collaborate to write a parenting book that mobilizes the latest child development research to help parents nourish entrepreneurial skills in their kids. Richard enthusiastically agreed and was especially excited about focusing rigorously on “evidence-based practices.” It’s fashionable to throw out all kinds of ideas about parenting, but what matters is the evidence. As Richard explained, research never delivers an exact “answer” to a question. What scientists do, at any given moment, is step back and consider the big picture that emerges from research, both the long-standing findings and the new trends. There are always ambiguities, and there is always more research that could be done, especially when we’re talking about new experiences for children. That said, academic research is powerful because it takes what we know, right now, and arrives at a conclusion that is best supported by all the evidence. Those kinds of conclusions are what Richard wanted to present to parents.

Jen agreed, and the idea for Raising Can-Do Kids was born. Afterward, we spent two years researching and writing the book. Our first step was to draft a short list of entrepreneurial skills or traits that not only conformed to what is known about entrepreneurs but that also connected well with decades of child development research. Our initial list wasn’t exhaustive, but it captured core elements of the entrepreneurial experience, and best of all, it gave rise to a range of evidence-based practices for parents. We utilized this list by performing in-depth interviews of some two dozen entrepreneurs across a range of professions, asking these individuals to reflect on how certain skills or traits had impacted their lives (for example, in their childhood, in the careers), and in some cases how they had influenced their own behavior as parents. Our goal was not to extract “proof” from all these talented and successful people, but rather to get real-life stories that illustrated how entrepreneurial skills were put to use in the world. Where appropriate, we dipped into secondary research on entrepreneurs to further illuminate what the main entrepreneurial skills were, and how entrepreneurs put them to good use.

We eventually refined our list to focus on seven skills or...