Thriving in the 21st Century: Preparing Our Children for the New Economic Reality

Thriving in the 21st Century: 

Preparing Our Children for the New Economic Reality

Barbara Frank

Copyright 2014 by Barbara Frank

Smashwords Edition

THRIVING

IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Preparing Our Children For The

New Economic Reality

Barbara Frank

CARDAMOM PUBLISHERS

JANESVILLE, WI

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Thriving in the 21st Century: Preparing Our Children for the New Economic Reality

Copyright © 2011 Barbara Frank/Cardamom Publishers

All rights reserved

Published by

Cardamom Publishers

P.O. Box 743

Janesville, WI 53547

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner and publisher of this book.

Print Edition: ISBN 978-0-9742181-7-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011904728

Library of Congress Subject Headings:

1. Education—Parent participation—United States.

2. Parenting.

3. Children—Life skills guides.

4. Vocational guidance.

5. Entrepreneurship.

6. Home schooling—United States.

7. United States—Economic conditions.

Dedication

To Tim, with love and gratitude.

Contents

Introduction

Section 1

How the American World of Work Has Changed

Technological Advances

Off-shoring

A Renewed Global Economy and Changing Living Standards

Learning From the Past

America’s History of Self-Sufficiency

What About the Schools?

Before We Begin

Likely Future Trends in the World of Work

Skills and Knowledge Will Be Paramount

Jobs Will Become Impermanent; Multiple Careers Will Be Common

Workers Will Need Continuous Training

Workers Will Take the Initiative for Their Training

Workers Will Take the Initiative for Their Careers

Self-Employment Will Boom

Workers Will Join the Global Economy

Preparing Our Children for This New Economic Reality

Section 2

The Seven Strengths Your Children Will Need to Thrive in the 21st Century

Strength #1: Creativity and Innovation

Strength #2: Entrepreneurial/Self-Starter

Strength #3: Computer-Literate

Strength #4: Communication Skills

Strength #5: Empathy and Concern for Others

Strength #6: Self-Sufficiency and Practical Skills

Strength #7: Money Smarts

Section 3

Giving Our Children the Advantages of the Seven Strengths

Homeschooling

Why Public Schools are Old School

Additional Options Beyond Public Schools

Lifelong Learning

The Case for Lifelong Learning in the 21st Century

How Our Society Discourages Lifelong Learning

Lifelong Learning and the Young Adult

Section 4

Careers, College, Self-Employment and Family Businesses

Careers

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Demographics

Current Events

Cultural Trends

Work That Can’t Be Off-shored, Scripted or Spelled Out

Industries with the Best (and Worst) Prognoses

What You Can Do to Help Your Child Prepare for a Career

How Important is  a Career Choice These Days?

College

Self-Employment and Family Businesses

Diversifying for Safety Via Self-Employment

Parents as Role Models

The Advantages of a Family Business

Ideas for Family Businesses

Helping Your Young Adult Go into Business

Conclusion

What Schools Don’t Do

What Parents Should Do

What Parents Should Not  Do

What Parents Can Do

Appendix A

It’s OK for Children to Get Bored…Really!

Appendix B

Teaching Children to Recognize and Appreciate Quality

Learning to Recognize Quality

Exposure to Quality

A Resurgence of Quality

Appendix C

President Obama vs. the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Notes

Introduction

Did you ever hear the story of the young wife and the canned ham?

A newlywed decided to treat her husband to a home-cooked dinner that included baked ham. She went to the supermarket and bought the same brand of canned ham she knew her mother bought.

When she got home, she lopped off about an inch of each end of the ham, put it in a pan, and was about to put the ham in the oven when her husband interrupted her.

Why did you cut off the ends of the ham?

His wife responded, That’s how my mother always does it.

But the ends are no different than the rest of the ham. You’re wasting those pieces.

That got his wife to thinking, so she called her mother and asked her why she cut off the ends of the ham before baking it. Her mother paused for a moment, and then said, Well, I never really thought about it. That’s the way we’ve always done it. Why don’t you ask Grandma? She taught me to do it.

So the young woman called her grandmother, now a resident of an assisted living community.

Gram, I’m baking a ham, and I’m wondering why you always used to cut off the ends of the ham before baking it?

Her grandmother responded matter-of-factly, Because, dear, that’s the only way I could get it to fit in my pan.

The mother’s response, That’s the way we’ve always done it, is a classic response, and one that’s all too human. Being creatures of habit, we pass many of our own habits and beliefs to our children without really thinking about it. Besides, it’s only natural to teach our children what we were taught.

In the case of the canned ham, no harm was done beyond wasting ham. But in other situations, teaching our children what we were taught can leave them unprepared, or even at a disadvantage.

Take this classic, for example, still being repeated in homes and schools everywhere:

Do well in school so you can get into a good college and earn a degree, and you’ll always have a job with a good company, with steady pay and benefits.

That’s what we, today’s parents, were told. The majority of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations worked for one company for many years, received substantial benefits and regular raises, and retired with pensions. It worked for them, so their advice became common wisdom. Our generation accepted this advice, and we’ve repeated it to our own children since they were small.

There’s just one problem. That advice made sense in the world our parents and grandparents grew up in, but that world is quickly disappearing. It makes no sense to pass along 20th century advice in the 21st century.

Let’s face it, times have changed.

For one thing, having a college degree is no longer a guarantee of anything. Plenty of new college graduates work at retail jobs making minimum wage because they can’t find a job in their field of study. There are also many adults with college degrees plus 20 or 30 years of work experience for whom unemployment has become a way of life because they cannot find any kind of work. (Meanwhile, degree-less people like Bill Gates of Microsoft become billionaires.)

To make matters worse, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, most of the 10 fastest-growing occupations with the highest job growth of the next decade will not even require a four-year degree. So much for the guaranteed employability offered by the college diploma.

How about working for a "good company"? These days it’s getting harder and harder to find a company that isn’t laying off workers, outsourcing work to private contractors, off-shoring work to other countries, being absorbed into a larger company thanks to a merger, or even shutting down.

Then there are those pensions our elders relied on. Over the past decade, some pension funds were raided and found empty while others greatly reduced what was originally promised to the retirees dependent upon them. Employer-funded pensions are becoming rare and worker-funded pensions (401(k)s, etc.) have become the norm. Even some pensions for state government employees, once considered a sure bet, are in financial danger after being invested in questionable hedge funds and other 21st century investment vehicles that have crashed and burned.

As for benefits, the cost of health insurance, once completely covered by the employer, is now increasingly paid for by the employee. The premiums employees pay are skyrocketing, yet pay raises are becoming rare. Overall, wages have stagnated since the 21st century began. In fact, pay cuts are making the news these days.

Yes, it’s a bleak picture I’m painting here, and a startling one for parents who assume that guiding their children toward a good and prosperous future simply requires them to pass on that same conventional wisdom:

Do well in school so you can get into a good college and earn a degree, and you’ll always have a job with a good company, with steady pay and benefits.

Given the current state of affairs, this statement sounds naïve and antiquated. Our elders told us to get the degree and the company would take care of us; that worked for a while. But now everything’s changed. We’re feeling our way along because we weren’t prepared for this. Jobs are no longer lifelong careers; in fact, they’re disappearing, and unemployment has reached scary highs. Our houses are dropping in value. If we manage to save anything, it earns almost no interest. Things are not going well economically for Americans these days.

Of course, the economy could turn around. It usually does, sooner or later. But that doesn’t mean that life will go back to the way it was before. Fundamental changes have occurred, thanks to technology and the global economy, that make the conventional wisdom dated, if not obsolete.

Still, the conventional wisdom is what we’ve been taught, and what our parents were taught. It continues to be the guiding principle of public and most private education in our country. If it’s wrong (in this book I will make the case that it is wrong, with one exception[*]), what do we tell our kids now? How do we prepare our children to survive and even thrive in a 21st century world that’s completely different from what we’ve known?

The answers to these questions are found in this book. The idea for this book came to me several years ago, when my husband’s manufacturing-related business began to decline after many years of more work than he could handle. My desire to find the cause of the decline led me to learn (long before the media caught on) about the tremendous changes we’re just beginning to see in our country and all over the world. I realized that my husband and I had to prepare our four children for adulthood differently than we were prepared for it.

Over the course of my research, I learned that there are certain skills and mindsets that will particularly benefit our children as future adults of the 21st century. This book will describe seven of the most important ones (Seven Strengths) and explain how our children can acquire them.

Before we get into that, however, it will be helpful to take a brief look at how we got to where we are: what’s changed, what’s causing the changes, and what the solution is. You’ll find the answers to those questions in the first section. In Section 2, you’ll learn about the Seven Strengths our children will need and how they can obtain them. In Section 3, we’ll look at the most efficient way to help our children develop the Seven Strengths. In Section 4, we’ll discuss careers, college, and family businesses.

By the end of this book, I hope you’ll see that passing on conventional wisdom to our children because that’s the way we’ve always done it is not the way to go anymore. Instead, you’ll have discovered what has changed and how you can prepare your children to do well despite those changes.

We live in interesting times. The increased rate of technological change we’re experiencing is bringing about a new kind of economy. That’s why it’s crucial that we do what we can now to prepare our children to thrive in the 21st century.

Barbara Frank

January 2011

Section 1

How the American World of Work Has Changed

Change brings opportunity.

Nido Qubein

Our children will work in a world that is completely different from the one we, our parents and our grandparents knew. A full description of the dramatic changes in the 21st century American world of work could probably fill many volumes. But by comparing a couple of simple lists, you can see a vivid picture of what has changed.

For most of the 20th century, a good company to work for was usually a large one. That was where you found the stability and benefits you needed in a corporate structure that encouraged moving up the ranks, with the appropriate pay raises along the way.

There are still many large companies in America, but they’ve changed, a lot, since the mid-20th century. In 2004, syndicated financial columnist Scott Burns compared the 1979 and 2004 Fortune 500 lists of the largest U.S. companies, and found that the top five in each list differed in important ways.[1]

The top five list for 1979 consisted of companies that had long been known for providing full-time employment and benefits to a majority of their workers, as large companies once did. Many people spent their entire careers working for just one of these companies, from high school graduation to retirement.

But 25 years later, in 2004, GE, IT&T and IBM no longer ranked in the top five, having been replaced by Wal-Mart, McDonald’s and UPS, companies with high levels of part-time employees given limited company-paid benefits. Only Ford and GM remained among the top five in 2004, but their employee numbers had decreased substantially over the previous quarter-century.

As Burns put it:

The American workplace has changed. The structure of jobs has changed. The security of work has changed. Benefits once used to attract new workers are being cut back.

Basically, today’s young workers face a much tougher work environment than those of 25 years ago.

Five years later, the pattern continued. Let’s take a look at the top five employers on the Fortune 500 list for 2009, compared to the 2004 list:

Note that Ford and GM are gone, replaced by Target and IBM. Like Wal-Mart, Target is a discount retail chain that hires primarily part-time employees. The jobs provided by such employers tend to be minimum-wage jobs with limited (if any) benefits, and with employee-funded 401(k)s instead of the traditional employer-paid pensions.

…companies are producing more with fewer employees.

One exception in 2009 was the reappearance of tech giant IBM, and with a larger number of employees than in 1979. A ray of hope? Unfortunately not. While IBM now employs more people than ever, most of them are residents of other countries. As of late 2009, only 25% of IBM’s employees worked in the U.S. (In the 21st century, one can no longer assume that American companies employ only American workers.)

IBM’s reduction of American workers was achieved by downsizing, the laying off of American workers, and off-shoring, the movement of jobs from comparatively high-wage America to countries where the prevailing wage is much lower, allowing the company to cut costs, increase profits and compete with the rest of the world.

This business model has been used with increasing frequency in companies all over the U.S. since the late 20th century. The cumulative effect is now being felt very strongly by American workers, and there’s no end in sight. Large companies are cutting back on workers; those they do employ rarely receive the kinds of benefits that our parents and grandparents enjoyed. As a result, the nature of large companies is changing, and fewer people work for them.

Comparing the Fortune 500 lists illustrates what changed, but doesn’t explain how these changes occurred. A chain of three significant events is at the root of the entire situation:

1) Technological advances led to

2) Off-shoring, which led to

3) A renewed global economy in which the living standards of all countries are affected.

Let’s take a look at each of these events in order to understand what happened.

Technological Advances

The staggering number of technological advances over the past 30 years has made our daily lives much easier. We wear our phones instead of running to the desk or the kitchen wall to take or make a call. We keep music in tiny portable computers instead of clumsy albums or cassettes. At the store, after a quick scan of our credit card, we’re on our way without waiting for change or check approval.

But those same advances, once adopted by the working world, resulted in fewer jobs. Writer Joni Evans touched on this issue in an article she wrote for The New York Times. Describing the changes in the world of publishing since the 1970s, she noted:

Then came the ’90s—the age of the computer, the atomic bomb that wiped out typewriters as well as typewriter ribbon, Wite-Out, carbon paper, in and out boxes and a serious percentage of stamps, Scotch Tape, stationery, staplers, paper clips, clocks, adding machines and, ultimately, paper itself. Palm Pilots phased out calendars, address books and calculators.

E-mail replaced phone calls. E-mail replaced meetings. And, eventually e-mail replaced secretaries. Soon, our efficient tools started to threaten more of our species. BookScan used bar codes to measure book sales, doing some work that sales managers used to do. Quicken started doing some of the accountants’ work. Google search replaced work of researchers. Spell-check and TextEdit did some of what copy editors and proofreaders had done. [2]

Just think of all the jobs eliminated in Ms. Evans’ workplace over the years: secretaries, sales managers, accountants, researchers, copy editors, proofreaders…not all of them, but most of them. And that was just in the publishing industry. Other industries have also been dramatically affected by technological advances:

•   Agriculture: improved farm equipment and high-performance seeds and chemicals enabled individual farmers to do an amount of work that once took dozens of people.

•   Manufacturing: robots replaced assembly line workers, who had previously performed repetitive tasks. 

•   Shipping: containerization replaced many longshoremen.

•   Construction: more efficient techniques and sophisticated equipment allowed a few people to do the work that once took many more. Homes and stores now seem to appear overnight, thanks to pre-fabricated components from factories that reduce the need for many on-site workers.

In agriculture and manufacturing, many years of technological advances have resulted in ever-higher productivity with fewer people. As a result, between 1870 and 2002, the percentage of total American jobs in agriculture plummeted from 48 percent to 2 percent. Manufacturing jobs as a percentage of total jobs decreased less dramatically (from 28 percent in 1960 to 12 percent in 2002), but enough that it put many people out of work.

Yet despite fewer people working in these areas, productivity in both categories has been rising for decades. In fact, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, manufacturing productivity in the U.S. doubled between 1980 and 2002. In 2004 alone, the productivity of American workers increased by 4.1%.

That’s a clear indication that companies are producing more with fewer employees. While this trend first began in blue-collar industries like those listed above, recent years have seen it expand to offices like Joni Evans’, where white-collar jobs once thrived. Computers and other high-tech tools now do the work people once performed, thus making remaining workers far more productive. This leads to the need for fewer workers, and inevitably, increasing unemployment rates.

Lou Dobbs in the Dobbs Report[3] blamed this trend for prolonging the recession of 2000-2003:

A recent study by the New York Federal Reserve Bank found that companies are now relying on rising productivity to pull them through economic recession rather than simply laying off workers and bringing them back when they are needed again.

Technological advances not only eliminated the jobs of secretaries and bookkeepers, but also the jobs of their bosses. Many managers simply became unnecessary.

Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute noted, …layers of middle management have been eliminated by better internal communications systems. In all these cases, jobs…are being consigned to oblivion by automation and the resulting reorganization of work processes.[4]

Many blue-collar and white-collar American jobs have disappeared because of technology and automation. But that’s just the first blow of a one-two punch.

Off-shoring

American manufacturers have used foreign-made parts in their products for years. But during the last two decades of the 20th century, the management of American companies realized that by manufacturing entire products in other countries, they could save a substantial amount of money due to much lower prevailing wages and less onerous government regulations. The savings far outweighed the transportation and management costs involved. So they began shifting manufacturing jobs overseas, in a process sometimes called outsourcing, but more accurately labeled off-shoring.

This trend gained strength after NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) went into force in 1994, and intensified once China’s participation in the WTO (World Trade Organization) was approved in late 2001.

Americans didn’t seem overly concerned with the resulting flood of foreign-made products. In fact, they particularly appreciated the lower prices of imported goods and began buying more of everything.

However, the same technological advances that had increased productivity also allowed companies to instantly communicate with employees across the globe. The advent of cell phones, laptop computers, videoconferencing, fax machines and the Internet led to a dramatic increase in the expansion of companies into other countries. As a result, many companies pared back more white-collar American workers, keeping only those willing to travel or relocate. Then they hired less-expensive white collar workers in other countries

Americans had become accustomed to the movement of blue-collar jobs overseas while most white-collar jobs stayed in the U.S. However, once the increasing interconnectedness of the world lead to the off-shoring of a substantial number of U.S. white-collar jobs, many people were shocked. The common belief that an office job was more secure than a factory job was shattered. White-collar jobs were not immune to off-shoring. In fact, as Jyoti Thottam reported in Time magazine:

As soon as a job becomes routine enough to describe in a spec sheet, it becomes vulnerable to outsourcing. Jobs like data entry, which are routine by nature, were the first among today’s obvious candidates for outsourcing. But with today’s advanced engineering, design and financial-analysis skills can, with time, become well-enough understood to be spelled out in a contract and signed away.[5]

In other words, even white-collar jobs aren’t safe if they can be quantified and spelled out, thus making it easier to transfer such jobs to the employee who costs the least. Increasingly, that employee lives in a country other than the United States.

Telephone call centers were one of the first sources of American jobs to move overseas in a big way. Ireland and India in particular proved to be an inexpensive source of call center employees, allowing companies to substantially reduce their costs in that area. For example, the average hourly wage of a telephone operator in India is about $1 an hour, compared to the $10-12 per hour earned by the average American telephone operator.

Recent studies[6] show that the jobs most at risk of going overseas include bookkeeping and payroll clerks, the above-mentioned call center operators, data entry clerks, legal assistants, and diagnostic support services. This last job category already affects many Americans, who may be unaware that their x-rays, CAT scans and mammograms are often sent overseas to be read.

Large companies in particular have been quick to off-shore many of their white-collar jobs. As mentioned earlier, the growth of IBM in recent years has been at the expense of American workers, with only 25% of current IBM employees being Americans. That percentage continues to shrink, by the way; as of 2009, a full 20% of IBM employees live in India. Ironically, IBM is in the process of patenting software that will help other companies determine off-shoring opportunities within their own organizations.

In the early 21st century, the phrase secure job has become an oxymoron.

The off-shoring process is popping up in areas once considered hot for American jobseekers. A study by Forrester Research[7] found that 68% of companies that use workers in Information Technology (IT) plan to increase their off-shore hiring. At one time, an IT job was considered a safe career bet; now it’s on the list of endangered jobs in America. The bottom line? If a job can be spelled out on paper, it can be off-shored.

While off-shoring gets a lot of attention because of its effect on the American economy, some believe that many of the lost jobs Americans mourn were already headed for extinction. As David Kirkpatrick of Fortune magazine reported:

Many of the same jobs politicians are trying to protect may end up disappearing anyway, as automation in business intensifies. Michael Fleischer, CEO of the Gartner research firm, put it this way at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: ‘Much of what’s being outsourced using technology today will be completely eliminated by technology tomorrow.’[8]

Whether or not Fleischer is correct, the fact is that the double whammy of technology and off-shoring was the death of the world of work that our parents and grandparents knew. Their life experiences led them to believe that long-term security could be found by working for American companies. Our experiences today are much different. In the early 21st century, the phrase secure job has become an oxymoron.

A Renewed Global Economy and Changing Living Standards

American companies now compete with the rest of the world, instead of just the rest of America. Companies in other countries, particularly China and India, can charge far less for products (while still making a good profit) because their workers aren’t accustomed to anywhere near our level of pay.

For the people of these countries, the renewed global economy has resulted in enormous economic growth and rising living standards. Considering the poverty that has plagued much of the developing world, this is a blessing for them. But it’s not working out so well for Americans, at least not in the employment arena.

American companies are now under even more pressure to minimize costs while increasing productivity. Cutting American workers’ wages and reducing their benefits has clearly become more common, as evidenced by the increasing number of part-time jobs inferred from the list of 2009’s top five Fortune 500 companies in Section 1. Here are a few facts about pay and benefits at the start of the 21st century:

•  "During the most recent economic expansion (2002-2007), incomes remained essentially stagnant for most families. In every other prolonged expansion in the last 50 years, incomes rose significantly."[9] To make matters worse, average hourly wages have dropped 1.3% just since May 2009, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

•  The percentage of workers with company-provided health insurance decreased from 83% to 67% between 1991 and 2000, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. More recently, Business Roundtable, an organization of large American companies employing a total of 10 million people and paying half of all corporate U.S. income taxes, released a study indicating that health care costs are hurting the global competitiveness of U.S. companies. Its report states that for every $1.00 of healthcare costs incurred by U.S. companies and their employees, G-5 (Canada, Japan, Germany, France and the United Kingdom) companies spend 63 cents, and BIC (Brazil, India, China) companies spend only 15 cents.

•  From 1993 to 2007, the percentage of workers covered by traditional pension plans dropped from 32% to 20%.[10] Compare those numbers to the 87% of employees at medium and large companies who had company-paid pensions in 1979. Also, a recent survey by Watson Wyatt found that, for the first time, the majority of Fortune 100 companies are offering new salaried employees only one type of retirement plan: a 401(k) or similar ‘defined contribution’ plan.[11]

Since American companies spent the last few decades reducing employee costs in order to remain competitive, their workers are now in the position of earning less money while requiring more money to pay for health insurance and to put away for retirement. The result has been a decline in the American standard of living.

That decline is just now becoming obvious because it was masked for several years, first by the dot-com bubble at the turn of the century, and then by the housing bubble of 2002-2007. The housing bubble in particular covered up the trouble many Americans were already in; low interest rates and ridiculously loose lending standards allowed us to use credit and home equity loans/lines of credit to provide the cash we needed but weren’t getting from our jobs. In addition, the housing bubble created many new jobs in construction, architecture, real estate, mortgages and financing…all gone now, leaving us with the full (and startlingly grim) picture.

In an article headlined Aughts were a lost decade for U.S. economy, workers, Neil Irwin of The Washington Post writes:

There has been zero net job creation since December 1999. No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent. Economic output rose at its slowest rate of any decade since the 1930s as well.

Middle-income households made less in 2008, when adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999—and the number is sure to have declined further during a difficult 2009. The Aughts were the first decade of falling median incomes since figures were first compiled in the 1960s.[12]

Many economists and pundits believe that the American economy is likely to struggle for some time. Consider that:

•   We’ve had a consumer-based economy for years (currently 70% of GDP), but financially strapped consumers are spending less on non-essentials, thus slowing down the economy.

•   As people lose the option of tapping into their home equity, if they have any left (house prices have fallen, and lenders have gone back to stricter standards), spending on big-ticket items, from boats and cars to college educations, will continue to plummet.

•   Foreclosures and bankruptcies, fallout from the housing bubble, are way up and continue to rise.

•   Wages continue to drop due to inflation and the competition for jobs. Those who lose their jobs are finding that new jobs don’t pay as much as their old jobs did.

So, we have a largely consumer-based economy where many consumers are cutting back on spending because they’re losing their jobs and homes. Combine that with the lowered standard of living we face as the global economy levels itself, and it’s clear that the American economy is not going to improve easily or quickly.

There are many theories about what our country needs to do to get out of this difficult situation. The purpose of this book is not to list those theories, but to acknowledge that we’re in for a rough time over the next several years, and to offer ideas for preparing our children to live and prosper, even in difficult economic times accompanied by a new world of work.

Learning From the Past

Our brief look at the current U.S. economic situation makes it clear that things have changed dramatically since our parents and grandparents made their way in the world. Our challenge is to see the world the way it is now, try to discern the direction it’s heading, and decide how we can prepare our children for it.

People unprepared for hardship suffer in hard times and in prosperous times, as well, because they weren’t given the tools to help them make hay while the sun shines.

Parents all through time have had this responsibility. But those who find themselves in the midst of tremendous change have the greatest challenge. Think about how parents in the early 19th century must have felt, bred to live in civilized cities but slowly realizing that their children’s futures lay in the untamed West. Or the rural parents of the early 20th century, who raised their children to take over the family farm, only to see them lured away to the city by the promise of steady jobs and pay along with the excitement of city life.

We share with the parents of the past a desire to prepare our children for the future. But unlike those good people, we live in a time of technological change unprecedented in human history. Scary enough, but experts say that the rate of that change is increasing. Change is coming with such speed that we can’t possibly know what will come next: whether life will become harder, or whether some dramatic new technology will bring prosperity to the entire world.

What we do know is that we can no longer rely on employers to take care of us, and we can’t advise our children to expect that, either. It’s a different world now, so we need to jettison the conventional wisdom, and develop our own.

I do believe we should prepare our children for hard economic times, though I certainly hope that things will turn around before long. People prepared for hardship can appreciate and profit from prosperity when it finally returns. People unprepared for hardship suffer in hard times and in prosperous times, as well, because they weren’t given the tools to help them make hay while the sun shines.

With all due respect to the generations of company men (and women) who enjoyed good 20th century jobs with steady pay and great benefits, I don’t believe they had to be prepared for hardship. The era of employers as caretakers of the workers did not require it. In fact, when you take a look at American history, that era appears to be a blip on the timeline of an otherwise self-sufficient people. At no other point in American history did large numbers of people have regular paychecks, employer-paid health insurance and guaranteed income in retirement.

A brief look at our American ancestors reveals that relying so heavily on employers for survival is not in the American tradition.

America’s History of Self-Sufficiency

Once upon a time, Americans took care of themselves.

When the Pilgrims came to these shores, there was no existing government or employer to offer them a safety net. They were on their own.

For a short time they attempted living a communal lifestyle, where everyone was expected to contribute to the provision of food and shelter for everyone else. That failed, thanks to human nature, despite the edict that those who wanted to eat must work. In the end, it was every man for himself.

The Pilgrims had to learn to build shelter, clothe themselves and grow food (with some help from Native Americans). Within each family were members who developed the skills of farming, hunting, home construction, weaving, and clothing construction. They cooked for themselves and cared for their own animals (whose existence was vital to the family’s survival).

As time passed and more people populated America, towns and cities formed. Their inhabitants offered to do certain types of work for