Future Proofing Kids: Building Adaptability, Conscientiousness, and Emotional Durability

By Tom Sellevaag, Upper Grades Head

We all have our metaphorical short lists: those resources that have proven invaluable over time, able to deliver just what we need when we need it. For example, I have my go-to news sources, the contractor who can fix whatever’s broken, and the pizza place that never disappoints. 

For issues relating to the understanding and parenting of adolescents, one of my first stops is inevitably the psychologist and author Lisa Damour. Her website includes a wide variety of free and subscription-based resources, and I’ve found she always has something interesting to say. Case in point: a recent episode of her podcast, Ask Lisa, in which she tackled the subject of “How to Future-Proof Your Kids in 2026.”  The idea of future-proofing children sounded sort of odd, so I was skeptical at first. But, as with so much of Damour’s work, it turned out to be a timely and wise message.

Future-proofing is not a new term. There are references to it going back at least 10 years, generally in the context of preparing children for a world of increasing uncertainty and rapid change exacerbated by digital technology. More recently, it’s been used in the context of preparing them for a world with AI. But Damour believes the concept has broader applicability, as a way of helping students (and the adults who support them) navigate the challenges of adolescence.

Damour suggests a focus on three key traits—with a helpful acronym: ACED.

Adaptability — Being able to make adjustments and find creative solutions to obstacles.

Conscientiousness — Being honest, earnest, ethical, upright, doing the right thing even though nobody’s looking. Damour notes that it helps predict important markers of adult well-being, including good relationships, having meaningful work, and a feeling of competence.

Emotional Durability — The ability to “withstand distress,” or cope with difficult emotions. Damour notes that it is closely connected to adaptability; when faced with big and challenging feelings, being able to regulate can free us up to find creative solutions to whatever is troubling us.

The podcast is heavily geared towards parents, and in my capacity as a parent of kids in Lisa Damour’s target demographic, I can highly recommend it. However, I also wanted to point out a few connections I see between the ideas she discussed and components of the Upper Grades program.

Cooperative learning is both one of the defining characteristics of our progressive model and one of the best opportunities to practice the ACED skills. Our vision of cooperative learning involves not just learning with each other (meaning, completing assignments simultaneously alongside a partner or group) but also learning from each other (implying that collaboration leads to multiple perspectives and deeper insights). This raises not only the benefits but also the stakes for collaboration. Emotional durability and adaptability are critical in any number of situations: when students are grouped with peers who are not their close friends, for instance, or when progress on an assignment stalls due to the difficulty of the task or working styles that don’t mesh perfectly. To move forward productively, students need to persist through struggle, tolerate the discomfort of things not going well, and think creatively about how to course-correct (and be open to their peers’ creative suggestions as well). Conscientiousness comes into play, too, as group members must figure out how each person can contribute fairly to the production of high-quality work. To be sure, collaboration is a lot to navigate, it’s not always terribly efficient, and sometimes it’s just downright frustrating. But as we were reminded during Covid times, we are hard-wired for connection. If we’re going to prepare students to thrive in a connected world—if we’re going to future-proof them—then we need to model and practice collaboration in our educational settings.

The Arts are another rich source of opportunities to practice ACED skills. Throughout the Upper Grades, our Arts classes call on students to be creative risk-takers who use their growing technical skills to realize an artistic vision that is shared with their community in some fashion. I never cease to be impressed by what our students create: this week’s 7/8 Arts Choice 1st Semester shareout featured pottery, prints, and literary magazines, for instance, and we’re getting excited about the 6th Grade play and 7/8 production of “Spamalot." But art is of course about process and product—and as any artist can attest, the process can be messy. Your clay bowl doesn’t take shape properly. You can’t get the nose quite right on your self-portrait. You forget your blocking, or your scene partner forgets their lines. Your voice cracks when you try to hit the high note. Your instrument is out of tune. You need emotional durability to cope with the embarrassment of a poor performance or frustrations with your castmates. You need adaptability to improvise your scene to cover the dropped lines, to quickly tune your instrument, to turn the “mistake” you sketched into something new. You need conscientiousness to show commitment to the ensemble and to the best work possible with your sculpture.

Even the most run-of-the-mill activities that students undertake in the course of a school day can work in service of future-proofed kids. For instance, one key element of Upper Grade Science classes is model-making, an iterative process that occurs at various points throughout a unit of study and serves as a map of students’ developing understanding. Model-making requires students to acknowledge and accept their incorrect or incomplete ideas and to constantly revise what counts as good-quality work. Concerned with grades and loathe to appear foolish in front of their peers, adolescents can wrestle with uncomfortable emotions when they don’t know something or have to come up with creative or innovative solutions. As some 8th Graders told Science teacher Chris Miller recently, only somewhat in jest, they don’t enjoy making initial models at the start of a unit because they know so much of it will eventually turn out to be wrong. 

Two words of caution. First, because of its association with other, more well-known “proof”s (ex: weatherproof, waterproof), the idea of future-proofing your children may imply a guarantee that is neither possible nor helpful. You might have confidence that your watch can handle being dropped in the pool or that your sleeping bag will keep you warm in 30-degree temperatures. But when life happens, as it surely will, we can’t know how our children will respond or how effective (or lucky) their response will be. Second, and relatedly, the quest to future-proof our children can, if we’re not careful, become just one more set of parental must-dos, another measuring stick to gauge our success or failure as adults. The goal is not to create a frictionless existence for our children; the goal is to equip them with the skills and habits of mind to be ready to engage with whatever life throws at them in the future—and the present. It takes time, patience, trial-and-error, and lots of modeling.

In the closing moments of the podcast, Damour has this advice for the adults who care deeply about the future health of the children in our care:

 “[our ability to future-proof our kids] is hinging on our wellbeing. ...assess how you are doing in terms of your own sturdiness and wellbeing. Go out of your way to protect it, because you...need and deserve that. And also if you’re going to cultivate future proofed kids, you’re going to need it too.”

Wise words for a future where uncertainty and possibility can co-exist.