DEVELOPING LIFE SKILLS IN YOUTH

Abstract

Life skills help young people navigate the challenges of everyday life. They enable them to develop into healthy, responsible, and productive adults. Adolescent life skills are central to psychological theories that aim to understand how skills and competencies develop. From a practical standpoint, the promotion of life skills has been identified as a key resource for enhancing positive and productive development in youth. As today’s societies rapidly become ever more diversified both demographically and politically, our youth and adolescents face multifaceted challenges. What do these societal demands imply for the key skills that young people need to acquire? Answering this question is important not only for maintaining the quality of civic life and social cohesion, but also for enabling children and adolescents to develop into healthy, productive, and autonomous adults. Defining such skills can also improve our assessment of how well prepared young people are for life’s challenges, and it can help us identify overarching goals for monitoring and evaluating education and intervention practices. Scholars, practitioners, and institutional administrators agree that having life skills help young people navigate these societal challenges, thereby contributing to their healthy, positive, and productive development. It is to define the key life skills in young people, identify their core domains, and review the theories and empirical evidence that address them and how they are acquired. The need for a developmental perspective is highlighted and the implications of a life skills framework for monitoring and evaluating educational and intervention practices are discussed. From the theoretical frameworks and exemplary models of life skills development in youth, it has become clear that despite conceptual differences, life skills frameworks for youth development suggest that all interventions need to provide age-appropriate ways for young people to fulfil their growth potential by improving their mental health, their learning, and their relationships with both adults and peers. On the other hand, this brief review has also shown that the frameworks provide a conceptual background for both research and application. They promise greater collaboration between researchers and practitioners, as well as improvements in developmentally informed intervention programs for youth. It highlights the potential for a new era of developmentally informed life skills intervention for youth. A coherent, rational, and sustainable intervention based on a youth development perspective and incorporating the principles of risk and resilience has tremendous potential for guiding the development of effective interventions.