What is Life Skills Education & Why it is Important?

The development of a child can be made possible by keeping all aspects of their personality in mind. This is the reason why Life Skill Education plays an important part in everyone’s life. In life skills education, the overall personality of a child is taken into consideration. It gives strength to handle any kind of situation and gives the courage to face struggle to achieve any target. By adding learning life skills subject life skills for students to the school curriculum, better results can be achieved. Understanding life skill education meaning helps in realizing its significance.

Here is the explanation of what is a life skill.

A life skill is used to describe basic skills acquired through learning or knowledge. Also, the daily routine can be said to be a life skill. Life skills also can include the ability of your emotions, finances, school performance, health, etc. If you are practicing life skills, so can improve a child’s esteem, social competence, and confidence. You are increasing the life skills in your life.

Now, the exact life skills meaning is when the group of psychosocial competencies and interpersonal skills that help people make decisions, build healthy, solve problems, communicate effectively, and think critically and creatively. Maybe life skills are directed towards personal actions or actions towards others.

Hence, the representation of what is a life skill. And life skills meaning.

Table of Contents

What are Life Skills?

There are many definitions to understand what life skills are.

A person needs a set of social features and personal capabilities to interact with themselves and other people in and around their environment and make a decision that requires high ability, also to find solutions to various kinds of problems.

Moreover, the skills required to deal positively with any condition to get the desired outcome is called life skills. Life skills can be developed through encouragement to adapt to society and promote positivity in personal behaviors and adopt a positive perspective toward work. This shows the importance of life skills education in everyday life.

What is Life Skill Education Meaning?

Life skills education is one such type of skill. Under this, the child develops the ability to discharge his life appropriately and to organize the activities related to life in a systematic manner. It is a type of education in which skills are developed to make the child efficient in such a way that he can make decisions in odd situations by his ability and intelligence.

At the same time, such miseries have to be developed in human life. So that he can become a skilled citizen.

Importance of Life Skills Education

If we want to live life successfully, then we need to understand the importance of life skills. And it is also very important to implement it in our life. If this happens then our life can move in a simple and right direction. Life skills make us competent to know how to make our life easy and simple, how to create a positive life, and how life can be spent in the right way. Therefore, life skills are very important in our life.

It polishes the ability to adapt to all kinds of circumstances and succeed in every aspect of society. Lack of life skills in the lives of new generations needs to be taken care of as it is important in life. Due to the absence of life skills, not only personal lives but professional lives and careers get affected.

By educating life skills, students can develop self-confidence in them. It makes them cooperative and communicative. It prepares them to take quick action in any unfavorable circumstances.

Types of Life Skills

There are two types of life skills that need to be taught to students. The first one is General Life Skills and the other is High-Level skills. And under these skills comes a variety of skills which are the following.

The following skills are covered under General skills:

Confidence skills
Decision-making skills
Stress alleviation skills
Adjustment skills in adversity
Self-awareness skills
The skill of negative tendency towards wrongdoing
Positive behavior
Critical Thinking
Society’s skills towards each other

The following skills are covered under High-Level Skills:

Excellent warmth and high mental level
Way of thinking
Mental and physical relaxation
Goal Setting and Problem Solving
Communication
Social support
Standard of living with health

Aims of Development of Life Skills

Following are the objectives for the development of life skills:

The purpose of social development.
Development of experimental knowledge.
The purpose of the development of adjustment power.
The objective of develops life values.
The objective of mental development.

Who Created the Basic Life Skills Curriculum?

The curriculum for life skills education in schools was created by UNICEF in close collaboration with the Ministry of Youth and Sport of Azerbaijan to give youth new knowledge and a valuable chance to apply novel skills in a protected environment for the effective transition to adulthood. What is Life Skills Education is a crucial aspect of this curriculum.

What Are Basic Life Skills Education For?

Objective: Youthful generations foster perspectives and convictions positively so that they contribute to Azerbaijani society and make progress as they transition to adulthood and the work world. Importance of Life Skills cannot be overstated in this context.

Target Audience: The life skills lesson bundle is intended to apply to the youthful generation aged 10 to 24 years of age who come to Youth Houses aiming to create a healthy condition to support and promote the advancement of youth initiatives. Life Skills Education is essential for their development.

Anticipated Result: Through life skills for students, youthful generations are outfitted with foundational skills essential for transitioning to useful adulthood; overseeing stress; learning to deal with difficult emotions; practicing positivism; improving confidence; feeling sympathy; learning to listen to others carefully; and learning to set personal limits.

Moreover, they learn to handle disputes well; find a balance between needs also, requests; impart confidently; put forth objectives; make decisions; solve problems; think basically and imaginatively; utilize chief functional skills; and learn to return from difficulty. Life Skills are critical in achieving these outcomes.

Imparting Life Skills Education In the Classroom

Classroom Discussions: An activity provides amazing open doors for students to learn and work on turning to one another in solving problems. Empower students to develop their understanding of the topic and personalize their connection to it. Creates skills, in listening, decisiveness, and sympathy.

Brainstorming: It permits students to produce ideas rapidly and spontaneously. Assists students with using their imagination furthermore, thinking out of the container. Great discussion starter because the class can imaginatively create ideas. It is fundamental to assess the upsides and downsides of each idea or rank ideas according to certain standards.

Role Plays: Along with being a fun activity and involving the entire class, to be active and participative, it also gives a fantastic strategy for practicing skills; experiencing how one could handle a likely situation in real life; increasing sympathy for others and their point of view, and increasing insight into their feelings.

Groups: Groups are useful when the time is restricted as it boosts student input. Permits student interactions, and permits them to, know, one another better which in a way improves group building and cooperation.

Educational Games and Simulations: They advance fun, active learning, and rich discussion as members work hard to make their statements or procure points. They require the combined utilization of knowledge, perspectives, and skills and permit students to test out assumptions and capacities in a somewhat protected environment.

Analysis of Situation and Case Studies: It allows an opportunity, to examine, and investigate, challenges, and problems and securely test solutions; providing open doors for working together in groups, sharing ideas, and new learnings and giving insight furthermore, elevates sometimes us to see things differently. Case studies resemble strong impetuses for thought and discussion. Engaging in this thinking system; students improve their own, decisive thinking, and decision-making skills. It also gives a chance to confront risks or any challenges and find ways of coping with them.

Future Implications

Although considerable progress has been made in the previous ten years and the current study too, life skills education is a powerful method of education, which upgrades social, emotional and thinking skills, and helps 21st-century youths accomplish their objectives.

It does so by strengthening their capacities to meet the needs and requests of the current society and find true success in life, but even more exact research is crucial for future researchers, academicians and professionals in the connected field to demonstrate hearty findings.

Essential Life Skills Everyone Should Learn:

Developing life skills is important and every life skill has its importance to apply in life. Following are life skills:

Self-Awareness Skills: By developing the Self-awareness skill, one can be aware of his/her doings. They will be aware of their own performance and their behaviors which will make them competent to handle any situation. A person will get to know his feelings for things or towards other people. It also helps them to make sound decisions.

Empathy and Sympathy Skills: With Empathy, a person will be able to understand other people’s perceptions, feelings, and circumstances any person is in. It simply puts them in someone’s place to understand their actual emotions. It helps them to react accordingly.

With sympathy, a person will be able to show appreciation and compassion towards other people and their emotional reactions.

Problem-Solving Skills: The life skill of problem-solving makes an individual trace a problem, suggest options to solutions, evaluate the solutions to pick the best solution, and then apply the solution to the problem within the time limit. It is one of the most important life skills to practice in life on an everyday basis.

Decision-Making Skills: Every now and then, an individual has to face times when they have to make a decision that can affect their life. With decision-making skills, a person develops the skill to make the right and appropriate decision and pass it on. Decision-making enables them to take decisions in any hard and fast situation.

Thinking Skills: Developing thinking skill is very important as it is the mental activity by which an individual can process information, use experiences, make relationships, finalize solutions to problems, pass on decisions, ask questions, and suggest new ideas.

Thinking skills are of four types:

Analytical Thinking Skills: It is a visual thinking skill that makes an individual competent to break complex problems into manageable components to solve them effectively.
Divergent Thinking Skills: With Divergent thinking skills, one can generate creative ideas after working on or exploring many possible solutions. It is spontaneous and free-flow thinking.
Creative Thinking Skills: Creative thinking skill helps a person to create something new. It also allows their brain to explore things and look at things in creative ways to suggest creative solutions. Creative thinking is infused with imagination, and it does not involve logical reasoning.
Critical Thinking Skills: Critical thinking skill is the opposite of creative thinking skill. It is the ability to make a difference between fake truth and real truth, judgment, and opinion. It prepares a person to think rationally and prepare to build trust in right and avoid wrong.

Communication skills: Without proper communication, you cannot express and make people understand your thinking and it can be made possible by developing communication skills. It helps them to convey to people in a very convincing and clear way. It develops confidence in people as well and good communication skills help them in the professional environment too.

Interpersonal Skills: Interpersonal skills are basically interaction skills and social skills. This skill prepares an individual to communicate socially in person or in a group. These skills have traits such as self-confidence, critical thinking, communication skills, active listening, leadership, etc. To develop interpersonal skills, one needs to start their day with an optimistic approach towards the day.

Accepting Criticism Skill: Accepting criticism is not easy but by developing this particular skill, one will be able to be open to constructive criticism and improve themselves according to that criticism. An individual should keep their emotional side and accept the truth to work on it. Students have to understand that not only studies will give them success, but they will also have to develop their skills.

DISCUSSION and CONCLUSION

An important and legitimate implementation of life skill education is a need of 60 minutes, for today’s society.

Imparting life skills education to the students can be useful as it specifically addresses the needs of children, and helps in motivating, and providing practical, mental, emotional, social and self-management skills for life changes. The importance of life skills education cannot be overstated in today’s society. Life Skill Education is crucial for students’ development.

Yadav P and Iqbal N (2009) showed positive aftereffects of imparting life skills education to students and bringing change in young adults’ mentality, thought and conduct by providing a supportive environment for them.

According to Errecart et al., (1991) and Caplan et al., (1992), life skills education ends up being a successful methodology in essential prevention education, as it is more interactive, utilizes a problem problem-solving approach and is exercise-based.

Hence, the teacher and the educated are both involved in learning and fun too.

All in all, life skills education has been viewed as a compelling psychosocial intervention strategy for promoting positive social, and psychological wellness of youths which plays a significant role in all perspectives like strengthening coping techniques and developing fearlessness and emotional intelligence, as well as enhancing decisive thinking, problem-solving and decision-making skills as have been proven and factual in the aforementioned studies.

Thus, there is, significance and significance for life skills education to integrate into the standard school curriculum by a life skills trainer/teacher/guide to improve the psychological wellness of students, outfit them with better-adjusted skills to confront the challenges of changing life situations and enable them to turn out to be completely functioning contributors to the host society and the world overall.

In the illumination of the above discussion, it very well may be concluded, that, Life skill education has its significance and significance in by and large advancement of students. Our findings are in common with the findings of Botvin, et al., (1998), Nair. M.K.C, (2005) some more, suggesting life skill education programs as a decent supportive system for young people.

You’ll Also Like:

If you are an online course seller and want to sell your course online, then Digital Class is the perfect platform for you.

Digital Class is an Education Marketplace for educators and institutes from all over the world who can manage and sell their courses online or place their services on Digital Class so that users can find it with just a few clicks.

Apart from this, Digital Class also provides you with a personal support manager, who helps you in course publishing, selling, and marketing.

Register yourself as a Course Seller on Digital Class & Download Digital Class App Now!