A child at play is a child learning.

What is the real role of a parent today? I’m not philosophical about the question, it’s a pretty direct one. The primary role of a parent today is to understand and prepare children for the future the children will encounter as adults. Can you visualize the social, cultural, environmental, economical world of 2035? Try 2050 or beyond.

I try to.

I make an effort here because if evidenced by the change in just the past 3 generations we will barely recognize the world our children will be adults in. So how do we prepare them for it?

Likely there will be many responses to that question.

I learned by listening to Sir Ken Robinson, 5-year olds are genius at divergent thinking – at creativity. As we age, we educate ourselves out of our ability to think originally, outside of paradigms….

It’s important to remember what it was like …not our childhood…because many of us had hard challenges there, but how we played. How did we think of trees, dirt, sticks, rocks and water when we were children? For me, they were play things. They were castles, caves, dinner settings, towers.