7 Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs

This week's article summary is The 7 Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs.

At a parent education meeting earlier this month, I used the 7 skills listed below (from Ellen Galinsky’s Mind in the Making) as an example of how we shape our students’ academic and character foundation needed for subsequent success in school and beyond.

 

As the article explains, these 7 skills constitute the many different qualities needed for successful executive functioning: habits and skills that help us manage our thoughts, actions, and emotions to achieve our goals.

 

What I like about this list of skills is it encompasses both the self (interpersonal) and relationships with others (intrapersonal). It’s these EQ habits and skills that complement and support our IQ (intelligence) to help us be happy and successful.

 

As I discussed with parents at that meeting, schools can often overly fixate on content knowledge and overlook that students’ social-emotional development requires as much time and attention and instruction and practice as academic work.

 

Especially as we are about a third of the way into the school year, ask yourself to what extent your students are developing and exhibiting these skills.

 

Joe

 

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What can teachers and parents do to strengthen critical executive function skills in children? These aren’t skills that children just pick up.

Executive function refers to the processes that involve managing thoughts, actions, and emotions to achieve goals. The skills make it possible to consider alternative perspectives and respond to changing circumstances (cognitive flexibility), to keep information in one’s mind so it can be used (working memory), and to resist automatic and impulsive behavior (inhibitory control) so one can engage in goal-directed reasoning and problem solving.

Why are they so important? Higher executive function skills have been linked to success in school and life—health and wealth in adulthood—and have been shown to be even more important than IQ for future success. While science tells us that developing these skills is critical in the youngest years, they can be developed throughout life: it’s never too late!

Focus and Self-Control: Children need this skill to achieve goals, especially in a world filled with distractions and information overload. This includes paying attention, exercising self-control, remembering the rules and thinking flexibility.

 

Perspective Taking: This involves understanding what others think and feel, and forms the basis for children’s understanding of the intentions of parents, teachers and friends. Children with this skill are less likely to get involved in conflicts.

 

Communicating: Much more than understanding language, reading, writing and speaking, communicating is the skill of determining what one wants to communicate and realizing how it will be understood by others. It is the skill teachers and employers feel is most lacking today.

 

Making Connections: This Life Skill is at the heart of learning: figuring out what’s the same, what’s different, and sorting them into categories. Making unusual connections is at the core of creativity and moves children beyond knowing information to using information well.

 

Critical Thinking: This skill helps children analyze and evaluate information to guide their beliefs, decisions and actions. Children need critical thinking to make sense of the world around them and to solve problems.

 

Taking on Challenges: Children who take on challenges instead of avoiding or simply coping with them achieve better in school and in life.

 

Self-Directed, Engaged Learning: By setting goals and strategies for learning, children become attuned and better prepared to change as the world changes. This helps children foster their innate curiosity to learn, and helps them realize their potential.