Preparing your child to lead in AI

business / Board Talk Board Talk MAPping the Future Preparing your child to lead in AI By: Donald L. Lim - @inquirerdotnet Philippine Daily Inquirer / 02:02 AM July 06, 2026 Share: MANILA, Philippines – Barely a week goes by without someone asking me how to prepare their children for an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven world. Just recently, a friend with a seven-year-old told me he was genuinely anxious, not the vague background kind of anxiety, but the sharp keeps-you-up-at-night kind.

What school should his child attend? If Philippine schools don’t teach AI competently, should the family consider migrating? Is it already too late to start?

Article continues after this advertisement I understand the fear. But I think the fear is aimed at the wrong target.FEATURED STORIES BUSINESS GCash, Maya reduce InstaPay transfer fees BUSINESS PSE welcomes new faces to board BUSINESS PH stakes claim in ‘purple gold rush’ Schools teach information.

But information is now ubiquitous, freely available, instantly searchable, endlessly generated. What made education valuable in the past was access to knowledge that was scarce. That scarcity no longer exists.

What remains scarce, dangerously and increasingly scarce, is the human capacity to think, feel and lead. Look at history. Humans have proven to be remarkably adaptive creatures.

Article continues after this advertisement We navigated the Renaissance, which upended how we understood art, science and the self. We survived the Industrial Revolution, which replaced muscle with machine and reorganized entire civilizations around factories. Article continues after this advertisement We are still navigating the Digital Age, which rewired how we communicate, consume and connect.

Every era brought disruption. Every era produced humans who adapted and led. But here is where I diverge from the optimists.

The threat of the AI Age is not that machines will replace us. It is that we will allow ourselves to become dependent on them before we have fully developed ourselves. I am not afraid of AI.

I am afraid of a generation that outsources its thinking to AI, its creativity to AI, its judgment to AI, and arrives at adulthood having never built the inner architecture that leadership requires. Imagine a world where the most powerful tool ever built is operated by people who have forgotten how to be human. That is the real risk.

So when my friend asked me what he could do, I gave him five concrete answers. Not app subscriptions. Not coding camps.

Five fundamentals, executable at home, starting tonight. First: Read with your child every night, with a book. Not a tablet.

A physical book. The ritual of a parent reading aloud builds vocabulary, comprehension, attention span and the experience of sustained, linear narrative. Children who are read to learn to follow an argument, absorb a story arc and sit with ideas long enough to understand them.

That is the foundation of critical thinking. Second: Have your child read aloud. Loud.

With confidence. Reading aloud builds fluency, diction and the courage to occupy space with one’s voice. Communication is not a soft skill.

It is the primary skill of leadership. Every great leader, in every field, has been able to articulate a vision, move a room, and persuade another human being. That begins with a child learning to project their voice across the living room.

Third: Learn a musical instrument, any instrument. Even cymbals. Or a guitar.

Music is not about performance. It is about activating the creative hemisphere of the brain that logical training tends to neglect. Playing an instrument builds pattern recognition, discipline, and the ability to translate abstract feeling into structured expression.

These are exactly the capacities that AI cannot replicate. Fourth: Learn a second language, any language. A regional dialect.

Spanish. Even Latin, though it has been dead for centuries. Acquiring a second language opens neural pathways that a single-language existence leaves dormant.

It builds cognitive flexibility, the ability to hold two conceptual frameworks in the mind simultaneously and move between them. That is precisely what you need in an AI world, where the ability to reframe a problem and think in multiple registers will separate leaders from followers. Fifth: Play a sport, any sport.

Chess counts. Swimming counts. Even a backyard game counts.

Sport builds the inner competitive spirit, the will to improve, to persist through failure, to measure oneself honestly. It teaches a child that outcomes are not guaranteed, that effort matters, that losing is survivable and instructive. In a world increasingly optimized for frictionless experience, children need the friction of competition to develop resilience.

These five things develop what matters most in an AI world: critical thinking, emotional intelligence and adaptability. These are not supplementary virtues. They are the core operating system for human leadership in any era, and they are buil