Preparing your child to lead in AI

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?

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I understand the fear. But I think the fear is aimed at the wrong target.

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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.

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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.

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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 built at home, not in a classroom.

Many parents today are waiting. Waiting for schools to teach AI. Waiting for the right curriculum, the right program, the right government policy. That wait may never end.

Schools are still figuring it out, and the curricula being written today will be obsolete before your 7-year-old finishes high school.

But here is what I know for certain.

AI learning, real AI readiness, begins long before your child ever sits in a tech classroom.

It begins at home, in the early years, through the fundamentals. And it does not begin with a screen. It begins with a parent.

We are also seeing the consequences of neglecting these fundamentals in real time.

Student suicides are rising. Young people are struggling to manage pressure, failure and uncertainty in ways that previous generations, for all their disadvantages, seemed better equipped to handle.

This is not a school problem. It is a foundation problem.

Children who read develop inner worlds rich enough to process difficulty. Children who play sports learn that losing does not end you. Children who make music find an outlet for what they cannot yet put into words. These are not academic exercises. They are mental health interventions, preparing them for life’s battle ahead.

Your presence in these activities is not optional. It is the variable that makes the difference. A teacher can introduce a concept. Only a parent can build a foundation.

The most advanced school in the world will always be secondary to a parent who shows up, consistently and intentionally, in the small daily moments that shape a child’s character.

So read the book. Not the tablet. The book.

That is where AI readiness begins. INQ

The author is president of the Management Association of the Philippines (MAP).

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He is also president and COO of DITO CME Holdings Corporation. Feedback at [email protected] and [email protected].