When Worlds Collide, We Can All Worry Less | By: Committee for Children Today's blog is written by Committee for Children Program Developer Tonje Molyneux. I’m a relatively new parent of a remarkable 15-month-old girl. Like most parents, I worry. A lot. I worry about everything from the food I’m feeding her today to the uncertain state of the world tomorrow. When I worry, I read. I read to assuage my worries, so I know what to feed her today and how to prepare her for an uncertain tomorrow. A few months ago, I happened upon a book I thought might hold some answers for me: Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs. In the book, author Ellen Galinsky translates her own research and decades of conversations with other researchers in child development and neuroscience into seven groups of skills children need to be successful. Each skill is addressed in its own chapter featuring both a discussion of the research underlying its inclusion in the list of seven and practical strategies for parents and teachers to use to help children develop the skill. Since I don’t want to keep you in suspense, Galinksy’s seven essential skills are: Focus and self-control Perspective taking Communicating Making connections Critical thinking Taking on challenges Self-directed, engaged learning As a program developer for Committee for Children, I got pretty excited when I first read that list of skills. “A lot of those sound like Second Step skills!” I thought to myself. This was another instance of my personal and work life colliding—something happening more and more often now that I’m a parent—and I couldn’t have been happier. In fact, “complementing” might be a more fitting term than “colliding.” Having worked on both the K–5 and early learning levels of the Second Step program, I am familiar with current research about what skills children need to be successful in school and life. So I was over the moon when I saw skills like focus, self-control, and perspective taking topping Galinsky’s list of the seven essential skills! We had just added a big focus on self-regulation skills to the Second Step program, and perspective taking is a key skill involved in the ability to have empathy. As I dug into the chapters themselves, my delight and excitement only grew. Galinsky cites a lot of the same research that informed the development of the latest edition of the K–5 Second Step program and the new Second Step early learning program. For example, she emphasizes the importance of developing the “executive functions.” Among her suggestions for developing them are the following: Promote focus: Play games that require children to pay attention Promote working memory: Play games with rules Promote inhibitory control: Play games where children can’t go on automatic pilot Those are precisely what the Second Step program’s Brain Builder games are designed to do! It’s not surprising that the same research led Galinsky and the developers at Committee for Children to a lot of the same conclusions about what skills matter and how to develop them. What makes me doubly excited about how well our programs complement Galinsky’s list and vice versa is that more adult caregivers will become aware of the importance of helping their children develop these skills as a result of the book, and more children will be exposed to effective skill development as a result of the Second Step program. That makes me worry less, both as a mother and as a professional. Read a review of Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs. Join the Washington Association for the Education of Young Children’s Mind in the Making virtual book club and discuss this book in monthly Webinars. The next Webinar is on January 17, 2012 and the discussion topic is Chapter 4: Skill Four: Making Connections.