Think Like a Futurist: Parenting Toward a Future You Can't Envision

Lately I keep hearing the same worry from parents, often younger ones, phrased a dozen different ways. The world feels unstable. The headlines feel relentless. And at the core of it is one question: how do we raise our children toward a future that is hard for us to picture?

Dr. Maisha T. Winn has spent her career on that question, and I was eager to have her join me this week. Dr. Winn is the Excellence in Learning Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, where she leads the Futuring for Equity Lab and directs the Stanford Accelerator for Learning’s Equity in Learning Initiative. She is also the author of Futuring Black Lives: Independent Black Institutions and the Literary Imagination, a book about how Black communities have long built their own educational institutions and used imagination and collective action to shape what comes next for their children.

Dr. Winn literally grew up inside one of those institutions. Her parents helped start an African-centered Saturday School in Sacramento during the height of the Black Power and Black Arts movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was part of a national network of schools built around three pillars, identity, purpose, and direction, with a curriculum drawn from the work of Black poets, writers, and artists. The founders understood that the general education system was not fully serving their children, so they built something that would.

Dr. Winn was researching these schools just as the pandemic unfolded. Surrounded by her materials while her two sons learned remotely at home, she realized that what she was studying spoke directly to the moment her own family was living through. The parents who created these schools, she says, were committed to reimagining rather than reacting to the turmoil of their era. That became the principle she and her husband leaned on with their sons, keeping their focus on the future they wanted to help build and supplementing the boys’ education with lessons drawn from those Black independent institutions.

I was struck by how Dr. Winn reframes the word futurist. Most of us hear it and picture crystal balls and science fiction. But as she points out, the job of our educational system is to prepare our children for the future. Yet schools are often so busy managing the urgent demands of the present (e.g., operations, logistics, discipline), that the question of “What kind of future are we helping young people imagine for themselves?” can get lost. This realization led her to study at the Institute for the Future, in an effort to find a richer way to think about what lies ahead.

One of the first exercises she encountered there was called “Looking Back to Look Ahead”, and she recognized it immediately. It was the same wisdom that came out of the Saturday School’s teachings about the Sankofa bird, the one facing forward with its head turned toward where it has been. You have to know your history to move forward. So she made it her mission to spend time as a futurist in that looking-back space, learning from the parents and educators who had been building better systems all along.

In her hands, being a futurist becomes a daily parenting practice. You decide what you want to be true for your child ten or fifteen years out, and then you ask how you get there from here. This resonated deeply with me. I have long encouraged parents to decide early what values they want to see in their children as adults, and to pour into them now what they will need to hold onto those values. So in my view, we should all be futurists.

We also talked about struggle, and how our sense of it has shifted over time. For the generation that built those Saturday Schools, struggle was a badge of honor, a privilege even. Today we hear the word and focus on self-care. Dr. Winn provides a helpful perspective here: the science tells us that cognitive struggle is exactly where learning happens, so we should encourage our children to embrace it. And for parents, on our own harder days, we can remember that struggling for the next generation is worth it, because people struggled for us.

Listen to How to Raise Kids Who Can Imagine a Better Future with Dr. Maisha T. Winn wherever you find your podcasts, or watch us on our YouTube channel. I hope you come away, as I did, a little less fearful of the future and a little more certain that it is ours and our children’s to reimagine.

Thanks as always to Paramount for its sponsorship, to The Seneca Women Podcast Network for its support, and to DonorsChoose for being a wonderful philanthropic partner this season. And thank you, as always, for reading, listening, and spreading the word about Ground Control Parenting.

Enjoy,