SECOND STEP E-Newsletter
November 2011
Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs
by Ellen Galinsky
Reading level: Adult
Seven easy things you can do right now to help the children in your life grow up to become lifelong, problem-solving learners. It seems too good to be true until you realize there really is no gimmick. Ellen Galinsky, president and cofounder of the Families and Work Institute and author of The Six Stages of Parenthood and Ask the Children, has simply burrowed right to the core of what people need to be prepared for life in the 21st century. She has consolidated her extensive research on child development and neuroscience into seven “essential life skills.” By breaking the skills into manageable, separate but correlated units, she provides everyday, easy tools for adults to use in helping children build on their own capacity to be successful.
Seven Not-so-Magic Skills
The seven skills, Galinsky says, that will help children navigate the world are:
- Focus and self control
- Perspective taking
- Communicating
- Making connections
- Critical thinking
- Taking on challenges
- Self-directed, engaged learning
She devotes one jam-packed chapter to each skill, covering definitions and descriptions, brain function explanations, research results, suggestions for encouraging the given skill in children, ways to nurture the skill in ourselves, exercises, and parents’ perspectives (a.k.a. stories). The emphasis is on doing the things we already do with children—talking, playing games, exploring—but doing those things in new ways. For example, to promote focus and self control, adults can play a variation of the Simon Says game, having children do the opposite of what is said. When the adult says, “Touch your head,” the children must touch their toes. Galinsky’s writing is reader-friendly, and the content offers something for everyone. Every chapter is divided into many tidbits; research and skill development are richly balanced with anecdotes.
Incorporating Mind in the Making into Your Program
Educators working with their students on social and emotional skill development in curricula such as the SECOND STEP program will find Mind in the Making a valuable resource in understanding and backing up the science behind these “essential life skills,” and a practical tool for supplementing lessons with games and activities. Again and again, Galinsky echoes the research that forms the foundation for these programs.
For example, she concludes that focus and self control are central to all the life skills she writes about. The “inhibitory control” Galinsky writes about involves controlling attention, emotions, and behavior to achieve goals. In the SECOND STEP program, children are taught that focusing their attention and listening help them be better learners, show respect, make and keep friends, and help the thinking part of their brains get back in control when they’re having strong feelings.
Galinsky also writes that perspective taking affects how we deal with conflict. In the SECOND STEP program, children develop an ability to take others’ perspectives before learning emotion management and problem solving. They learn that people can have different feelings about the same thing, feelings can change, and they can use clues to identify others’ feelings.
Educators and parents alike will find Mind in the Making to be a rich, refreshing approach to the challenge of preparing the next generation for adult life. Facts and figures are important, to be sure, but knowing how to learn, and loving to learn, may just be the true keys to success.
Read an online Q&A with the author on the NAEYC website.
