My husband and I had a talk the other day about how Jake will not only have to be bilingual but likely have to speak three different languages in order to be competitive in the working world 20 years from now.

The conversation had us both shaking our heads and realizing that kids today face a far more pressure-filled reality.

I'm not alone. Parents are taking steps to ensure that kids stay ahead of the curve. Spanish- and Mandarin-only immersion schools are cropping up all over the U.S., including in Maryland.

Some families are taken it up a notch by moving to China and other countries. Newsweek has a great story on parents who are leaving their lives in the U.S. to start new ones in foreign countries so that their kids could have a truly global education and upbringing.

Of course, not every family can take this route, as the article points out. You need money, other resources and the resolve to move to another country.

But the story highlights a continuing debate over globalization and how it's impacting our kids in particular:

It has become a convention of public discourse to regard rapid globalization—of economies and business; of politics and conflict; of fashion, technology, and music—as the great future threat to American prosperity. The burden of meeting that challenge rests explicitly on our kids. If they don’t learn—now—to achieve a comfort level with foreign people, foreign languages, and foreign lands, this argument goes, America’s competitive position in the world will continue to erode, and their future livelihood and that of subsequent generations will be in jeopardy. Rogers is hardly the only person who sees things this way. “In this global economy, the line between domestic and international issues is increasingly blurred, with the world’s economies, societies, and people interconnected as never before,” said U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan in remarks in the spring of 2010 at the Asia Society in New York. “I am worried that in this interconnected world, our country risks being disconnected from the contributions of other countries and cultures.”

Are parents adding too much pressure on our kids or is this one of the realities of a competitive marketplace?

Are U.S. schools behind on preparing our kids for the future? Should schools start foreign language instruction earlier as some countries are?