October 23, 2007 10:16 AM

Career skills learned on the playground
Posted by Diane Danielsonat 10:16 AM

I caught an interesting article from Penelope Trunk called "Thriving Careers Start Earlier Than You Think."  In the article, she looks at a few life skills that your children need including:

1. Perserverance
2. Making decisions when you may not have all the information
3. Teach your kids to be positive thinkers
4. Teach frugality
5. Realize that you have limitations and your child is living in a different society from the one where you grew up.

Click here to read the full article.

These all made complete sense to me, so I found it striking that there was vehement opposition to some of her recommendations.  Clearly people mistook her #2 suggestion to say "don't research ever."  The point she was making was that most of the time we have to make decisions where we don't have and will never have all the information.  Perhaps the people who read her advice and see such an "extreme" all or nothing, need a few "positive thinking" lessons to be more accepting of the fact that not everything is black or white, but mostly in-between.

There are only two things I would add to her list: 

1. Resilience.  We need to teach our kids that sometimes bad stuff happens to good people, sometimes we lose, and sometimes life is just not fair.  I'm a big fan of children playing sports for this reason. On a side note - as it's impossible to not mention the Red Sox this week - this new generation of kids in New England has no idea what it's like to stand behind a team during rough times. As a sometimes coach, I'm starting to wonder whether it's harder for some of them to comprehend that not everyone gets to play or root for a championship team all the time.
2. To take responsibility for their actions.  Too many kids (and adults) are being taught to blame  others for their problems and are unable to take responsibility for their actions.  Yes, the dog may have eaten your homework, but who was the one to feed it to the dog in the first place? Or may have forgotten to feed the dog, so that he was hungry? Or left the homework on the floor where the dog could get it?  And, the likelihood that the dog specifically ate your homework just to get you in trouble ... not likely.  Although, if it was a cat ... that could be a possibility. 

My last example may sound silly, but we've all heard the excuses before (especially the teachers!).  Flash forward 10-15 years, and what happens when your child is in the office claiming he couldn't get the assignment done because someone else didn't give him the information, or she wasn't given proper instructions, or didn't have time because he had all these other crises, and the absolute worst excuse of all time, because "the rest of the team is out to get me."  Any of you bosses out there heard any of those lately?  Any of you then had parents call in to defend their children?