kids playing and practicing critical thinking

Skills Your Children Need to Know to Succeed and Thrive in The 21st Century

kids playing and practicing critical thinking
Grades at school can be important, but are they the only defining factors for development and success? There is more to life than just grade. We now acknowledge the importance of prioritizing mentorship and fostering essential life skills in children. These skills are vital for promoting leadership skills, socialization, and healthy emotional well-being. Many skills are essential for children’s development and success, but this blog post will focus on five.

5 Essential Life Skills Your Kids Need to Know:

group of asian kids doing homework

Interpersonal Skills

(One of The Most Essential Life Skills)

Interpersonal skills are the ability to interact and communicate effectively with other people. Communications and interactions are integrated heavily into our children’s everyday life. They form relationships at such a young age and will continue to maintain existing ones and develop new ones as they grow older. There are numerous soft-skill elements under interpersonal skills, two of which are effective communication and relationship management. Children must be able to listen actively and respond appropriately to verbal and non-verbal cues to interact with people well. They need to know how to build, navigate, and manage relationships.

Emotional Regulation

(Ability to Understand Others' Emotions)

Emotional regulation is the ability to identify, monitor, and regulate emotions. Emotions can be incredibly influential as they affect children’s well-being, and influence how they interact with other people. They must learn how to identify the causes of their emotions to understand and regulate them effectively. For example, there might be a scenario where your child feels frustrated because a friend said something mean. What can your child do? Should they fall under their emotions or take control and manage them? They can potentially think through all the possible causes of the incident and underlying causes of their emotions, and find the best solutions to manage them.

mom helping daughter with homework

Decision-Making

(Life skill that can decide your actions)

Next is decision-making. Why is decision-making so important? As we all know, bad decisions may lead to negative consequences. Decision-making dictates what the children choose to do, which potentially may influence their lives. We need to mentor children to first be aware of what decision needs to be made, how to construct multiple solutions, evaluate, select the best suitable one, and then reflect on the results. Great and appropriate decisions can go a long way!

Critical Thinking Skills

(Life Skills That Help You Identify and Solve Problems)

Some of these are the ability to identify the problem, integrate and evaluate existing knowledge and experience to generate new ideas, predict events, and understand things from multiple perspectives. Critical thinking skills are exceptionally important as they aid children in making solid and sound judgments and solving problems creatively.
asian boy student thinking critically and seriously

Grit

(Many other life skills are related)

Grit is the ability to overcome challenges. Children constantly face challenges throughout their lives, however, they must not give up too easily. According to Angela Duckworth’s research on grit, it was revealed that rather than intelligence itself, grit in combination with other life skills such as self-control, was a better predictor of better outcomes.

We hope these life skills are essential for your children to succeed and develop in their life.

1 thought on “Life skills to help children and teens succeed”

  1. We all want our kids to succeed in life, but now there are so many rules that we are simply too afraid to make mistakes. However, parents have to, at least, provide essential life skills to their kids. These are the ability to be helpful and kind, the ability to be compassionate and truthful, and the ability to be patient and confident. These are the things that our kids will really find useful today, tomorrow, and always.
    I admire the research you have done on the topic. I actually have some things that I would like to add. Would you mind taking a look here https://aliciaortego.com/life-skills-for-kids/

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