Students need essential skills in order to succeed. Children with a strong foundation of life skills are motivated, resilient, confident and successful. Children need more than just a safe and loving home. They need to master essential skills in order to move through life.
Children need mental toughness, resilience, social competence, self-awareness, and moral integrity. You can make all the difference in whether your kids become successful adults by teaching them these skills 7 essential skills to your children.
1. Self-confidence
People often believe that self-esteem is the same thing as self-confidence. These two concepts differ from one another. Self-esteem is how we sense ourselves and how we interact with the world. Whereas, self-confidence measures our belief in our abilities.
There is little evidence that high self-esteem leads to academic success or happiness. However, studies have shown that children with high self-confidence tend to do better academically. Children with high self-confidence equate their grades with their efforts and strengths.
You can boost self-confidence in children by:
- Modelling self-confidence yourself
- Not getting upset about mistakes
- Getting them to try new things
- Allowing them to fail
- Embracing their efforts
2. Empathy
Empathy isn’t only a critical factor in life, but it’s also a factor in creating and maintaining healthy friendships and relationships. This helps to reduce conflicts and misunderstandings. Being empathic helps lead to a helping attitude, kindness, and success in life.
And like any skill, empathy can be taught and developed in children, and children need an emotional vocabulary to develop empathy.
Here are some excellent ways that you can teach empathy at home:
- Model empathy. It’s important to model any new skill that you want to teach your child. This is important because it helps your child understand what empathy looks like, sounds like, and feels like. It’s easier to teach a child a new skill when you’ve already mastered it yourself.
- Discuss emotions. Talking openly about emotions is essential. Do not dismiss or bury their emotions, letting your child know that all feelings are welcome. They need to learn how to manage them in a healthy way through discussion and reflection.
- Help out at home or in the community. Helping others helps to develop kindness and caring in children. It can also enable children to interact with people of diverse backgrounds, ages, and circumstances. Being around a group of people different from themselves helps make it easier to show empathy for all people.
- Praise empathetic behaviour. When your child shows empathy for others, praise that behaviour on the spot. Make a point of focusing on and encouraging empathetic behaviour. This will help to promote more of that behaviour in the future.
3. Self-control
Self-control is staying on task and interrupting any undesired impulsive reactions by not acting on them. Students’ ability to control their cognition, emotions, and impulses may play a part in performing well academically.
These self-regulatory skills also reduce stress and increase well-being. Here are a few tips on how to teach self-control at home.
- Help kids avoid temptation: out of sight, out of mind
- Create an environment where self-control is rewarded
- Encourage children to practice planning
- Play games that help practice self-control
- Remember that kids need autonomy
4. Integrity
Integrity means making ethical decisions, asking questions, and following instructions—even when faced with difficult situations. It’s a set of learned beliefs, capacities, attitudes and skills that create a moral compass that children can use to help them know what’s right.
Helping your child learn to be integral can be as simple as calling out it when you see it and recognizing it. This allows students to see and understand ethical behaviour.
Teaching children the five fundamental values of integrity will help them to achieve academic success. Here are the five values of integrity:
- Honesty
- Trust
- Fairness
- Respect
- Responsibility
5. Curiosity
What is curiosity? Curiosity is having a strong desire to learn or know something.
Children who are curious often don’t need the information they seek. They seek answers to their questions for the sake of gaining knowledge. Students who are curious may also actively seek out challenges and new experiences to broaden their horizons.
How curiosity helps students:
- Because it is a key ingredient in learning
- Helps to keep students always learning
- Helps students in their decision-making
- Can be useful in navigating arguments or confrontations
You can help students develop curiosity by encouraging questions. Also, you can also find media that stimulates curiosity and helps them find credible sources to build their knowledge.
6. Perseverance
Perseverance is the ability to keep going when things are tough. Some call it grit; others call it a growth mindset, but perseverance is the ability to keep on trucking.
For many students, perseverance can be challenging. Mistakes and failures can be something that frustrates students and keep them from succeeding.
It’s all about doing things that may not come easy right away, which is hard for many students. Here are four tips on how to teach students to preserve.
- Encourage a positive inner voice and mindfulness
- Praise their effort and process, not their intelligence
- Put their failures and mistakes into a new perspective
- Give them the chance to struggle
7. Optimism
Knowing the difference between pessimism and optimism can help students improve how they respond to challenges. Optimism is a healthy mindset for students; it’s the mindset of looking at the glass as half full rather than half empty.
There are various techniques to teach students to stay optimistic rather than switching to a pessimist mindset.
Here are some things to try:
- Have students notice good things as they happen
- Try to train student’s minds to believe they can make good things happen in their life
- Don’t have students blame themselves when things go wrong
- When something good happens, give them credit
- Remind students that setbacks are only temporary
- Be optimistic yourself; students will notice it in you
GradePower Learning Can Help Teach These Skills
Contact your local center today to learn more about how GradePower Learning programs can help your child learn these essential skills to get the most out of their education.
