Raising Kids Who Can Thrive Amid Chaos in Their Careers

The
recession is driving home a bitter truth about the 21st-century job
market: A tidy, linear path to a secure career is increasingly hard to
find.

Careers wax and wane faster than they used to. Back when Wall Street
was hot -- in 2006 -- Kris Perez-Hicks followed her father's advice to
major in finance and accounting. But since graduating in December, she
says, she has applied for more than 100 jobs, with no luck. Kenneth
Vergara of North Olmsted, Ohio, expected that his 24-year-old
daughter's top-ranked merchandising and design college program would
enable her to start a fashion career, he says. But since graduating
last year, she's having trouble finding a job that pays the rent.

Learn to Earn

A sampling of job-market skills to instill in young people:

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  Grades K-5: Helping, earning, saving.


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  Grades 6-8: Exploration, logical thinking, problem-solving.


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  Grades 9-12: Finding purpose in work, entrepreneurial thinking, self-assessment, adaptability.

Work & Family Mailbox

Many
of the jobs that were hot at the beginning of the millennium have
already vanished from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' biennial list of
the 30 fastest-growing occupations. (Remember desktop publishing? Or
the audiologist shortage?) "The world of work is changing very quickly,
and faster than in the past," says Jonas Prising of Manpower, an
employment-services company. Many young workers say they expect to
change jobs 10 to 14 times in their lives, he says.

So what is a parent to do to equip children for this? To ride the
job-market surf, workers of the future will need not only the usual
technical or professional qualifications, but an additional set of
soft, downright squishy skills that experts say must be developed in
childhood. A sampling:

Adaptability. Katharine Brooks,
an author and career-services director at the University of Texas,
Austin, uses chaos theory to orient her students to the coming job
market -- a dynamic, evolving system in which the farther you try to
look into the future, the more difficult it is to predict outcomes.
Thriving in it will require adapting to incessant change.

Adaptability isn't a term you'll find in child-rearing manuals, but
it starts with helping children make logical choices when confronted
with many options. With small children, this means answering the
endless "why?" questions that help them understand external realities
and develop logical thinking, says Stanley Greenspan, a child
psychiatrist and author.

With school-age children, it means discussing their opinions and
asking nuanced questions to develop gray-area thinking, Dr. Greenspan
says in his 2007 book, "Great Kids." And with teens, it means
encouraging them to critique their own work, not harshly but
realistically, so they can become their own mentors. These skills can
help young adults avoid being incapacitated by change.

Exploration. Workers who enjoy
learning and discovering new pursuits will likely fare best. Instilling
this in children means encouraging them to try new things without fear
of failure or shame. "Children start to show preferences very early on
for things they like. Sometimes parents can stifle that" if they think
it's taking the child in the wrong direction, says Dr. Brooks. Instead,
she advises "letting them go wherever their little minds take them."

This requires patience. "I hear from parents, 'Oh, it's the hobby of
the week. One week it's play the tuba, the next it's become a
cheerleader or a scuba diver,' " she says. Without spending too much on
new gear or fees, "when possible allow the children to wander," she
advises.

Entrepreneurialism. This ability
-- taking initiative and risks to put new ideas into play -- is being
touted by everyone from the president on down as the tonic our economy
needs. In a Gallup survey released today by the nonprofit Junior
Achievement, more than 60% of 1,100 employees and managers say
entrepreneurial attitudes are important for workers of all kinds.

In its school programs on entrepreneurship, Junior Achievement
encourages students to notice unmet needs around them and imagine ways
to fulfill them. Encourage children to ask themselves, for example,
what could be done to help consumers use less water or energy? To help
people drive to work more easily? Junior Achievement cites Motorola
cofounder Paul Galvin, who began mass-producing car radios in 1930
after noticing people trying to custom-fit home radios into their cars.
That kind of resourcefulness, experts say, will never go out of style.

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  Email
  sue.shellenbarger@wsj.com