Supercharge Your Kids – Part 01 – The Problems

Part one for Supercharge Your Kids. So let’s talk about the problems that our kids are facing. Not just our kids, but our educators, our parents, we’re all facing this problem, but I don’t think everybody recognizes some of it, or we aren’t doing enough sometimes to. Take care of the problem. So here are the problems being faced as I see it.

Technology is changing jobs. It is a historical constant. It’s something that has happened throughout history. Technology will change jobs. I know there’s a lot of cry out there for Oh, technologies go take my job away. Technology is changing this and I don’t have a job anymore, etc. Or the new one now is AI is going to take my job, etc.

Here’s the thing. Technology has always changed jobs, has always made things different. Think about it. When was the last time you picked up a telephone that was connected to the wall and said, hello operator, can you please connect me to so and so out at this city in place? We don’t do that. We have cell phones now.

So the job of operators has gone away for the most part. We don’t even get operators. When we call in for support and help, we get an automated thing. Choose from this list, say, or type in those people no longer handle support calls and things. What about this? When you went to work today, when you went to the grocery store, when you went Christmas shopping, did you stop at the blacksmith and get your horse shooed before you did that?

Or did you just jump in your car and drive there? We used to have blacksmiths that had jobs. They no longer have jobs because there aren’t enough people that have horses that use them for travel. We use our cars. Here are two examples. Just a couple other jobs to think about that are different that no longer exists that the world has changed that technology has changed these jobs.

What about a train caboose engineer? What about a coal miner? We have so few coal miners left and a lot of them are fighting to keep the coal mines open. Instead of moving to things like solar energy or windmills or other types of energy, because it would take their job away. But there are jobs learning how to make solar cells and windmills and construct those and put those together and install them and repair them.

There’s a lot of jobs for that, not to mention the science jobs to make those things better, more efficient. I know coal mining. Didn’t change too much, but we got better at being able to process it to be able to get it out of the ground without having so many coal miners risk their lives. So even that changed itself.

So technology will always get rid of some jobs. Technology will always change. But the thing is, there are new jobs, new avenues out there for people to have these jobs, and that’s what our kids will have. But we’re still preparing them to be operators in blacksmiths. The future our kids are facing is so radically different than what I had, what my parents had, what most of us have had, right?

What have they dealt with? Think about it in their, in a lot of their lifetimes, the kids that are in high school are right after. They were born right after the towers fell, right? How did that change things? How did that change our world? And now we’ve got AI and how is that changing things? Not to mention the Internet, how you used to have to go someplace or keep a menu magneted to the refrigerator to see what somebody offered.

My kids don’t do that. They just look it up on their phone whenever they want it. So things are radically different for our kids in many ways. Even though I didn’t have a horse and have to shoo it, like I mentioned, there are still a lot of things that I grew up with when I was growing up that were very similar to the decades previously to me.

That’s no longer the case. There are so many things different now than there in these last 25 years than there were for the 25 years before that. It’s just a list. That is way too big to even try and figure it all out. We understand that then we had covid to add to all that. How did that change the world?

I had a kid that couldn’t even graduate high school with their friends that couldn’t go to prom that couldn’t spend the last year of their schooling. Most of the last year of their schooling with their friends. How did that change them? How did that change the world? They had to start working from home.

How did that change things in their thinking, their perception? And the thing is, this future is here. It’s not coming. It’s not something that will be here later. It is here right now. But we aren’t preparing them for it. We are still preparing them as if it’s 1950, 1980, and the world’s going to be the same, but it is vastly not the same.