Life skills for children
Welcome to Mind in the Making.
How can families and teachers give kids the life skills they need to cope in our multi-tasking, multi-media, modern world?
Over the next two weeks, I will send you 12 research-based daily tips that promote life skills that will help your child thrive now and in the future.
These simple, everyday things you do as a parent will help your child's ability to achieve his or her goals amid everything else that is going on around them. And you don’t need expensive materials, training or equipment.
Importantly, it is never too late to help children learn these life skills, whatever their ages. Life skills aren’t just for kids: we adults need them just as much as children do. Mind in the Making is NOT a guilt trip—we want to help you understand your child’s development in new ways, and we will provide you with lots of suggestions to make it fun. And we want to hear your suggestions too.
All of the life skills we suggest involve executive functions of the brain. Some people don’t like the word executive because it conjures up an image of a boss in your brain ordering you around. But executive functions enable us to manage our attention, our emotions, and our behavior in order to reach our goals. They pull together our feelings and thinking so we can reflect, plan, analyze and evaluate. They emerge in the first few years of life, especially during the preschool years and don’t mature until young adulthood or later.
Here is an exercise you can do to get warmed up:
Select a person who is close to you—your partner, an older child, a parent, a coworker, or a friend. Now guess how this person would answer this question: “If you had one wish to most improve things at home . . . at work . . . in our community, what would that wish be?” Then ask that person if you guessed correctly. Why or why not?
This is practicing the skill of perspective taking.
Tomorrow I will introduce the seven life skills and why they are important. Thank you for signing up!
Ellen
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