Want Job Security? Go to Preschool.

People sometimes scoff at the notion that preschool actually teaches our children anything. After all, if you peek into a preschool classroom, you are very likely to see cute little kids playing with toys or doing an art project or singing a song – not exactly what we think of as an academic environment.

But the preschool naysayers are full of hot air, especially when it comes to training tomorrow’s skilled workers: It turns out that children pick up invaluable “soft skills” in preschool that lead to better on-the-job performance and bigger paychecks years later, according to Nobel-prize winning economist James Heckman, as reported by NPR’s Planet Money blog.

Soft skills as defined by Heckman, a professor at the University of Chicago, involve our ability to pay attention and to be curious and open-minded while also being able to remain cool, calm and collected. As described in the NPR blog post, Heckman found that we don’t learn these skills at work, or even in middle or high school, but in our earliest days in preschool.

I’m no Nobel laureate, but anecdotally I can see how these soft skills are becoming part of my 3-year-old’s arsenal as she navigates her daily life as a preschooler. The work she is doing there is deceptively complex. As NPR put it, “[preschoolers] are learning valuable skills: how to resolve conflicts, how to share, how to negotiate, how to talk things out. These are skills that they need to make it through a day of preschool now. And they are skills they will need to make it through a day of work when they're 30.”

Even naptime can be turned into a teachable moment. Last week, when one of Lucy’s teachers let me know that she had been disruptive during naptime by making noises while other kids were trying to sleep (and when Lucy herself should have been sleeping) I asked her, “Lucy, how do you think the other kids felt when you were making animal noises while they were trying to sleep?” After a moment’s pause, Lucy’s sheepish, single-word response was, “Awake.”

While there is no napping allowed at work, the lesson of common courtesy and empathy is certainly something that applies to offices everywhere, and I’d much rather my daughter learn these lessons sooner rather than later.