Longitudinal studies offer powerful predictive indicators. These studies are conducted with nominated children, often over decades, and reveal how childhood experiences and behaviours can influence everyday functioning when they become adults. The UK-based 7UP series popularized this approach with their long-term focus every seven years on the lives of fourteen children. 63 Up was broadcast by ITV in 2019.

The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study is a landmark program that has researched the lives of 1037 New Zealand children who were born between April 1972 and March 1973. One of the Dunedin long-term findings is that study members who exhibited better childhood self-control tended to have younger-looking brains in adulthood. The study also found that experiencing smoking, mental health problems, and obesity during adolescence made it more likely that the brain would show signs of faster aging in adulthood. A quality childhood really counts.

Effective parents and educators develop resilience in children so they will thrive through anything that happens up ahead. The secret is to implement protective factors. These are interventions in children’s lives that can lead to healthy development, and might involve friendships, mentors, and engagement in sport and recreational activities.

On the opposite side, risk factors can compromise child development. Being allowed to roam around the local streets at midnight when they are ten years old is one example. They also include experiences that cause toxic stress and anxiety. The world will be an even better place in the future if we lower the risk factors and raise the protective factors in children’s lives today.

Analysis of everyday data helps us to partly predict a child’s future. With predictive policing, we can calculate with up to a 90 per cent certainty the likelihood of some teenagers committing an offence, especially if there are many risk factors in their lives. Medical analysts can assess with up to an 80 per cent probability whether children will contract the flu, eight days before they feel ill. The GPS on the child’s mobile phone can signal where they were today. If anyone in the child’s group indicated on social media that they were feeling sick at the time, your child’s chances of contracting that illness are much higher, given their physical proximity to the unwell person.

Ensuring that children can read competently is a valuable protective factor. When they are highly literate, young people tend to be more successful in other education subject areas. One effective strategy for boosting literacy is to occasionally ask them to predict what might happen next in the book they are reading. Another variation is to show them the title and the cover of the book and ask them to conjecture on the inside content. While sharing a book with early-stage readers, you might pause before turning the page and ask: So, what do you think will happen next? These practices encourage a child to build connections with their prior knowledge, and to develop hypotheses about the intent of the author.

A further protective factor is to show children how to set and achieve goals. This goal-setting can begin with 4- or 5-year-olds, and might be initiated with a simple conversation about what they would like to do this weekend. Once children reach 7 or 8 years of age, most have the brain capacity to think abstractly about near-future events. There is merit in setting goals that are just out of their reach. Building their goals into a plan for the whole family will provide ongoing support and a deep sense of inclusivity.

Even writing goals down will give children a greater chance of making them happen. You might ask your child a series of questions such as: What do you want to achieve? How and when will you do it? Goalsetting generates a belief that they have some control over predicting and creating their own future. When times get tough – which they invariably will – goalsetters are more likely to resolve the issue, rather than wait for life to dictate to them.

Global education systems today focus on what we call capabilities for children. A capability is something that makes you more capable of coping with an uncertain world up ahead. The list can include literacy, numeracy, initiative, work agility, resilience and empathy. My advice is to include predictive capability on that list. Given the exponentiality of change in their future, children’s predictive acumen will stand them in good stead. The goal: For all young people to become knowledgeable futurists.