How a toddler is teaching me the future will be child’s play

Laura NewellThe West Australian
Camera IconA cute baby girl being playful Credit: Getty Images

A grainy photograph shows my precious first-born happily slumbering on her “big girl” bed at day care, bringing tears to my eyes.

At nearly two, my walking, talking “baby” has moved up to the “toddler room”, abandoning the cot she’s so far slept in for that proper bed — and she’s just fine with it.

Her parents, on the other hand, are wrecks.

The photo, sent to me by the wonderful day care staff — clearly quite used to seeing parents’ crestfallen faces as they announce the impending adulthood of their cherubs — was designed to calm my worried mind about my daughter’s welfare, reassuring me that should she struggle or cry they were there to comfort her.

Sod that. Who was there to wipe away my tears?

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If there’s one thing having a baby teaches you, it’s that time moves far too quickly.

I still can’t even bring myself to give away my daughter’s 00000-size babygrows she wore as a newborn, what hope is there of me handling the first day at school?

Yet here was my little one pictured without a care in the world, seemingly entirely unaffected by the change wrought on her life by what would — to an adult at least — seem massive.

And it’s perhaps lucky that children so often handle change brilliantly when one considers that the world of work they will enter will look nothing like the one we traverse today.

Right now we haven’t even conceived of most of the jobs that our children will be doing, according to experts like IBM’s Jay Bellissimo who was in Perth this week to speak to resources industry leaders.

Outlining the changes that will come with artificial intelligence, robotics, cloud computing and data mining, Mr Bellissimo offered the idea that the leaps my grandparents and parents experienced in working conditions with the advent of the modern computer will seem like nothing when we compare it to what is to come.

But we mums need to also realise that far from being something to be afraid of, it will lead to a range of opportunities.

For starters, new technologies will need people to teach them, maintain them and develop them.

It’s my daughter’s generation who will develop the skills to do just that.

And we’ve certainly started the conversation.

For instance, there is already far more emphasis being placed in schools on STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — and things such as coding.

So while my girl sleeps like, well, a baby, in that big bed, I’ll be learning, too.

Mainly it will be about how I need to stop worrying about the many transitions to come.

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