Suits & Sneakers presents: "How To Prepare Your Kids for a Future You Can’t Predict" with Mark Sham

Suits & Sneakers hosts several events each month in Cape Town, each featuring a different guest and theme. The idea is to create a space for ongoing learning that helps you broaden your thinking in a fast-changing world. This event will be hosted on the evening of Tuesday, 17 November at The Tryst in Woodstock.

WHAT IS THIS EVENT ALL ABOUT?

One of the hardest things about raising children is that you’re preparing them for a life you won’t be able to live on their behalf. You choose a school, encourage their interests and try to give them opportunities. Along the way, you draw on your own experience to help them make decisions. But how much of the advice that made sense when you were growing up will still be useful when they’re adults?

AI is changing how we learn and work, while social media gives children access to people, ideas and influences that their parents never encountered at the same age. Having more information and more options doesn’t automatically make it easier to know what to trust or which direction to take. Even choosing subjects or discussing a possible career becomes more complicated when nobody can confidently describe the world they’ll eventually enter.

In this Suits & Sneakers event, Mark Sham draws on his new book, Happiness Isn’t What You Think, to explore where you can put your attention as a parent when so much about your child’s future remains uncertain. Written as a love letter to his daughter, Norah, the book examines how much of life we’re expected to navigate without ever being taught how.

Some of the questions we’ll explore during the evening include:

• Are we preparing our children to achieve, or also to handle what achievement doesn’t solve? How do we encourage ambition while helping them build a life that offers more than good marks, a job title and the next milestone?
• How do we prepare them for the things we can’t protect them from? Rejection, mistakes, disappointment and loss will be part of their lives. What can we do now to help them navigate those experiences?
• How do we help them trust their own judgment in a world full of opinions? Between friends, social media and our own expectations, how do we give them room to question what they’re told and discover what matters to them?
• What are they learning from us without us realising? What do our reactions to money, mistakes, achievement and disappointment teach them about how life works?

Come away with a clearer sense of what deserves your attention alongside their education, which assumptions may need another look and what conversations are worth having with your children. There will also be time to bring your own questions into the discussion.

MORE ABOUT MARK SHAM

Mark Sham is a speaker, entrepreneur and the author of Happiness Isn’t What You Think. He has been speaking professionally since 2010 on topics ranging from marketing and future thinking to, more recently, happiness. He founded Suits & Sneakers and The Tryst, creating spaces where people can learn from one another and broaden their thinking.

Kicked out of school at 17, Mark spent years figuring out where his curiosity and abilities could take him. His experience shaped his interest in the gap between what education prepares us for and what life eventually asks of us. Becoming a father to Norah made that question deeply personal: what could he pass on to his daughter when he couldn’t predict the world she would grow up in? His book grew into a love letter to her, sharing what he has learnt while encouraging her to question it too.

SPONSORS & PARTNERS

This Suits & Sneakers event is proudly brought to you by the many small business owners that are Suits & Sneakers members. Together, we have created a support structure for small business owners and our collective goal is to grow the economy, while lowering unemployment. More about that on the night.