Every child needs skills to navigate life effectively. These skills help them acquire adaptive and positive attributes to combat life’s challenges and deal with issues practically. However, although life skills offer immense benefits to children, many parents neglect to teach their kids life skills and focus solely on academic skills.
The truth, however, is that life skills are just as necessary as academic skills. While not all kids will become lawyers, astronauts, or engineers, every child will become an adult, so it’s critical to equip them with the necessary skills to live their lives successfully. A survey shows that 89% of adults say that life would have been easier if they learned practical skills in schools revealing how beneficial it is to learn life skills.
Why life skills are as critical as academic skills
Below are the best reasons why parents should teach their children life skills as much as they teach them academic skills.
1. It helps them gain confidence
Confidence is one of the foremost things to teach kids early in life. Life skills allow children to believe in themselves because rather than being protective, you trust them with specific responsibilities, allowing them to make mistakes and learn from them. As a result, they trust their abilities and rely on their instincts and intelligence to tackle situations, building their self-confidence.
Therefore, while you want children to succeed at schoolwork, you should also teach them how to succeed in life by believing in themselves. There are limits to what they can do without self-belief regardless of how much they know. However, self-confidence allows them to implement their knowledge, enabling them to maximize their potential.
2. It teaches them how to express themselves better
Self-expression is essential for enabling kids to communicate their thoughts, feelings, and opinions. By teaching children life skills basics like communication strategies, you encourage them to express their views constructively. Also, they can empathize with others while expressing their displeasure, allowing them to communicate without hurting or making others uncomfortable. Additionally, positive self-expression enables them to build excellent interactions among classmates and friends. It teaches them how to speak, listen and be heard without upsetting others, allowing them to collaborate effectively with a team, and establish sustainable relationships even as kids.
So, while you want your kids to understand the subjects taught in school, you also want them to be able to communicate effectively by training them on life skills.
3. It promotes critical thinking
Critical thinking is crucial to solving life’s complex situations. Therefore, by encouraging critical thinking as a life skill, you activate their problem-solving abilities and enable them to provide solutions to challenges. Additionally, because life skills involve making mistakes, they are forced to think critically to prevent such errors from recurring. Consequently, they perform better at their studies because they can develop creative ways to answer questions.
Critical life skills your child needs
There are specific life skills essential for your kids’ overall development. Let’s examine them below:
1. Emotional intelligence
Emotional intelligence is critical to help kids cope with the different emotions they experience. For instance, they can identify emotional triggers and control them when equipped with adequate emotional intelligence skills. They can also show empathy and respect other people’s differences when relating with them. This helps them to build good relationships, control negative emotions and become empathetic.
2. Money management
Studies show that personal finance life skills are essential to financial stability. However, another survey reveals that young people have the lowest level of financial literacy. Therefore, it’s vital to equip kids with personal finance skills like budgeting, saving, and investment to manage finances appropriately. Additionally, teaching kids an essential skill like debt management will help them cultivate healthy money habits to prevent debt.
3. Daily life skills
Daily skills are essential strategies needed to get through every day. They can range from cooking to self-care and more. These skills help them live each day independently without having to depend on you. This involves teaching them basic regular activities, depending on their age.
4. Communication skills
Excellent communication skills help kids build exceptional interactive techniques as adults. They will learn how to ask questions, listen and communicate their points effectively when working with a team.
How to combine academic and life skills when teaching your child
Academic and life skills are essential when training kids. It is possible to teach children both types of skills by making learning time an opportunity to develop life skills.
For example, when working on a project or assignment, teach them how to plan, gather and organize information, so they can use this knowledge in real-life circumstances.
Additionally, you can relate a specific topic to realistic circumstances when explaining a concept. This will enable them to learn life skills while learning schoolwork. Incorporating age-appropriate life skills into the curriculum is also an excellent way to help children acquire life skills while in school.
Conclusion
Life skills are essential to helping children live successful lives as kids and adults. At Explico, we teach students necessary life skills in classrooms by implementing decision-making, self-confidence, and analytical skills. Students learn how to make decisions by enabling them to select their courses themselves. They also train to be self-confident through strength and weaknesses evaluation. As a result, they become aware of their strengths and capabilities. Also, they improve on their weaknesses to become a better version of themselves, enhancing their confidence.
Lastly, they learn to be analytical through assessments and training from teachers. To learn more information on life skills and academic skills, visit our website for more details.
