Factoring in future successes
By Joey Pitchford
Published in News on March 16, 2018 5:50 AM
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News-Argus/CASEY MOZINGO
Speaker Nikki Bush uses a ball during a speech to talk about how it would roll away if it did not have some sort of boundaries to hold it in place, much like a family needs to work to stay close.
The world is changing faster than many people can keep up with, and parents and educators need to adapt to make sure their kids are prepared.
That was just part of the message Thursday at the Wayne County Public Schools annual parent seminar, where international speaker Nikki Bush discussed "future-proofing" children and becoming a tech-savvy parent. Bush, a South African parenting expert, speaker and bestselling author, spoke to a full room at the WCPS Professional Development and Family Engagement Center, located at 415 S. Virginia St.
She said that the massive overload of information available to people nowadays, while at times overwhelming, has also made right now a time of opportunity.
Bush detailed the kinds of jobs which are likely to flourish in the coming years -- those that are either highly specialized or highly creative.
Creativity matters not only in fields like graphic design, but in the business world, where creative ideas will help differentiate job seekers in a market where degrees do not mean as much as they once did.
Bush said that creativity is all the more important now, because having alternate income sources outside of one's primary job is becoming more necessary.
"The bond of loyalty between employers and employees is gone now, economics drives everything," she said.
Bush asked the parents what their goals for their children were. Among their responses: happiness, success, safety. Bush said those responses, especially the first two, were common.
"Here's a question for you, can we make anybody else be happy? Can you make anybody else successful?" she said. "That's a personal choice, isn't it? What I want to go over today are the five "X-factors" of success in this fast changing world. "I think if we get those right, we will upscale our children with the skills to create their own version of happiness and their own version of success."
Those five factors were creativity/breaking conventions, learning, resilience, knowing yourself and relating to others. By teaching kids those five traits, Bush said, parents and educators can better prepare them to be adaptable in a world which is liable to present challenges they could not have predicted.