Are We Doing Enough to Raise Global Kids?

Why did Jim Rogers move his family to Singapore?

Consider Happy Rogers. At eight, she stood in the schoolyard of Singapore's elite, bilingual Nanyang Primary School — a poised, precocious blonde, full name Hilton Augusta Parker Rogers, whose Dakota Fanning hair shimmered in a sea of darker heads. She navigated her friendships and did her homework entirely in Mandarin.

Happy is the daughter of Jim Rogers, the legendary American investor, who moved his family to Singapore in 2007 with an explicit educational mission: his daughters would grow up fluent in Mandarin and knowing Asia. He hired a Chinese-speaking governess for Happy from birth, and in 2013 the nine-year-old showed off near-native fluency reciting a Tang dynasty poem at a Singapore event, to applause from an audience of mostly Chinese Singaporeans — with her younger sister Bee singing Chinese nursery rhymes alongside.

"The best skill that I can give to my children," Rogers said, "is to speak fluent Mandarin. They certainly have to know China."

Is raising a "global kid" a parenting model or a luxury?

The Rogers experiment is the extreme edge of a question that was haunting middle-class parents everywhere in 2011: are American and Indian children being prepared for a world where economic gravity is shifting east? Rogers bet his family's geography on the answer being no — that Mandarin fluency plus deep familiarity with Asia was the single most valuable endowment he could give children born in 2003 and 2008.

There is a less flattering reading, of course. Relocating a family across the world for linguistic immersion is a privilege available to perhaps a few hundred families on the planet. Most parents can't hire a governess or move to Singapore; their version of the same anxiety shows up as Saturday-morning language classes, exchange programs, or simply hoping the school's Mandarin offering is better than a box-ticking exercise.

But strip away the wealth and the gesture contains a real point: children absorb languages effortlessly, and the window closes fast. Happy herself said she never "learned" Mandarin — she "just picked it up listening to native speakers since I was born." The Rogers family simply bought their daughter the one thing money can't quite buy for the rest of us: total immersion before the window shut.

The question in the headline — are we doing enough? — has no comfortable answer. Most of us are doing what we can afford. The Rogers just had the means to make the question literal.