Developing life skills among the children of today

With so much for the children to learn in today’s high-tech world, it’s all too easy for them to miss out on critical life skills like leading others, working in teams, caring for the environment, managing time or comparison shopping. Life skills go hand in hand with citizenship and workforce development for any nation and also helps children to succeed later in their personal life.

ROLE OF PARENTS

Parents play a crucial role in developing their children socially, emotionally, cognitively, and academically. They are always ready to help their children to get through life’s challenges—from the little bumps in the road to the big stuff. Today parents need to be more aware and involved when it comes to the development of life skills in children. When it comes to diagnosing the way their child is developing, they should be equally concerned about their skills-based learning, as much as they are about the level of their children’s academic progress. So it is of paramount importance that parents make sure that the life skills proficiency of their children is tested and compared with the children of similar age group globally.

Let’s look at some of the essential life skills and the ways to develop them early among children so that they get prepared to lead a successful life in the 21st century.

ECONOMIC COMMON SENSE

“I want it! I want it! I want it!” How many times have you heard this when your kids spot a candy, a toy, or just about anything else you can think of that kids think they must have right now? But often we overlook this valuable life skill called ‘Economic Common Sense’ that we should be teaching our children. It starts with transferring the very basic skill among children to differentiate between a need and a want.

This is an important life skill and can be taught during day-today transactions at home or while shopping for daily needs and wants. Give children a certain amount of pocket money every week or two, that they have to spend on their expenses. If they want to buy something a little more expensive, ask them to save up their pocket money to buy it. Or, you can lend them a helping hand by telling them that for every unit of money they save, you’ll add a certain amount of money to their fund for buying the product they so much want to buy.

This will motivate them more to save and will also make them learn the concept of comparative shopping.

Tell them how to value and judge the utility of products instead of just looking at the price tag to make any buying decision. When they want to buy a few things when you go shopping, encourage them to pick one and to make a choice to drop one of the options. This will drive home the economic skill of understanding the opportunity cost of letting go of some options while choosing another.

GOAL SETTING

Kids are never too young to begin learning about goal setting. Most children unknowingly develop many small and big dreams in their minds but never get to achieve them as they never acquire the most objective life skill called Goal Setting. As children begin learning about this life skill, they need to be taught how to write down their goals, and to create a simple action plan on a chart that allows them to check off each task as they go about completing it. When this useful skill is practiced regularly, kids will start making out the difference between shortterm and long-term goals and they will start developing and following their action plans without you having to remind them continually.

Of course, children need a little guidance to make their goals specific and to measure the progress towards their goals over time. Get your children involved in understanding some goals set for your household like buying a house or car and explain how you have gone about achieving those goals over time. Skillizen is an education driven organization which is established based on an idea conceived at Harvard Business School. The idea speaks about imparting strong Decision Making and problem-solving skills to younger citizens during the phase when their mind undergoes hardwiring for various concepts around them

DECISION MAKING SKILLS

This skill allows children to find solutions to problems or conflicts and in the process, opens up opportunities for valuable life lessons. Logical thinking and problem-solving skills support children’s ability for decision making. Decision making shapes them into the type of adult, they will become and the life paths that they will choose later.

To develop decision-making skills in your children - you must allow them to make decisions even though they are more likely to make wrong decisions initially. It should start with a few simple decisions at home to making bigger decisions about the choice of subjects at school etc. When kids learn a hard lesson from their own mistakes, it provides them with useful insights to use for future decision-making. It’s important for them to learn from their own experiences and remember not to repeat them again. Children should be taught to distinguish their own strengths and weaknesses so that they are well prepared to make better decisions in life regarding them.

DEALING WITH FAILURES

One of the most important life skills that we can develop our children is ‘resilience’—i.e, being able to take on challenges, bouncing back from failures, and to keep trying. Children learn to take on challenges when we create an environment with the right amount of independence and support —not so much as to be limiting their choices, but enough to make them feel safe. Encourage your child to try new things and allow reasonable risk, such as climbing a tree or riding a bike. Offer a new challenge when they seem ready, e.g., “I think, now you are ready to learn to ride a bike. Let’s give it a try.” Focus more on their efforts than their achievement, e.g., “Learning to ride the bike was really hard, but you kept trying. Well done.”

The acquisition of critical life skills is a fluid and ongoing process and working with children early in their development of life skills with examples that they can understand and apply on their own is a good place to start. Unfortunately since the school curriculums across the world do not offer much to transfer life skills, it will be a good idea to enroll your children for an online life skills curriculum to get them started on the journey to build real-world skills!