The 7 Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs (2024)

Want to better understand how children learn and how we can take simple, effective steps to promote engaged learning?

Mind in the Making shows what professionals, parents and caregivers can do—starting today—to strengthen the critical executive function skills in children. They aren’t the kinds of skills that children just pick up; these skills can be fostered to help children and the adults in their lives.

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 circ*mstances (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!

Life skills are based on executive functions; they bring together our social, emotional and cognitive capacities to problem solve and achieve goals. Studies have found they are critical to success in school and life.

1

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.

2

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.

3

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.

4

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.

5

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.

6

Taking on Challenges

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

7

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.

More than 100,000 families, educators, community leaders and professionals from education, libraries, medical facilities, museums, nonprofits, churches, juvenile justice systems, and more have participated in the MITM training modules.

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