The Role of Life Skills Training In Developing Emotional Maturity and Stress Resilience among Adolescents

Abstract

Resilience has been defined as “the ability of an individual to function competently in the face of adversity or stress.”(Kirby and Fraser, 1997). Life Skills are the abilities for adaptive and positive behavior that enable individual to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life – WHO. Emotional Maturity is the ability to monitor one’s own and other people’s emotions, to discriminate between different emotions and label them appropriately, and to use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior. Life skills training is used to help adolescents not only acquire knowledge, but also to develop relevant skills to enable them to reduce the risk of behaviors and negative consequences (Botvin & Griffin, 2004).This skills training is one of the best alternative strategies for the proper practice in essential abilities for managing adolescent life, particularly decision-making and critical thinking ability by considering information and behavior consequences, and ability in recognition of strong feelings in one’s self and others to modulate one’s own behavioral response, resolve disagreements, and follow rules in a productive and healthy manner (WHO,2003). The present study focuses on the impact of Life Skill Training Program on Emotional Maturity and Stress Resilience among adolescents. To examine the same the sample of 30 adolescents were given the Life Skill Training and 30 adolescents didn’t receive any Life Skill Training and both the groups were administered with Emotional Maturity Scale and The Resilience Scale. The research findings indicated that there is a significant difference between the experimental and control group; experimental group which received Life Skill Training had high Emotional Maturity and high stress resilience compared to untrained group.