Many parents wonder what are the most important skills to develop in a child, so that they can achieve a good level of personal fulfillment, both in school, work, and other aspects of life.
Many project their highest ambitions onto their children; some already envision them graduated and with a successful career, even though they are still children.
In some cases, a parent’s ambition and desire to see their children succeed can push them far beyond what is reasonable, and achieve the exact opposite of what they are seeking.
In fact, it is not always the case that the child shares the same vision of life as their parents; therefore, being pushed in a direction that is not their own can steer the child away from that goal.
However, if you read me often, you should know how to behave to prevent these situations.
Now, I want to help you understand which are the most relevant skills to nurture through the educational approach you intend to adopt towards your child. I will start by clarifying one of the most common misunderstandings, the difference between knowledge, skills, and competencies; then I will focus on the skills. So, let’s not waste any more time and get started!
1. Knowledge, skills and competencies: what is the difference
Searching online or reading some magazines, you may have come across these three concepts: knowledge, skills, and competencies. You might have seen them often used interchangeably, and perhaps you have also gotten used to conceiving them this way. Actually, they are three distinct concepts; they are all strategic to best promote your child’s development, but they need to be well understood.
– Knowledge (= Knowing): More than a few commentators tend to slip on this banana peel and confuse knowledge with learning; something I urge you to pay close attention to.
A person’s knowledge is not simply acquired information; much less can it be considered as mere memorization of facts. Knowledge always represents a person’s reflection on the information they acquire.
Therefore, what your child needs is to go beyond the logic of mechanical learning, that is, mere notions, and reinforce the learning of meanings on which to build their knowledge in the most solid way possible.
If you continue to follow me, I will provide you with many resources on this aspect as well.
– Skills (= Knowing how to do): Skills represent the ability to use one’s knowledge, that is, to apply it to real situations to achieve a goal. For example, if I have studied the physical principle of the lever and need to lift a heavy weight, I can apply that knowledge to lift it effortlessly using a lever and a fulcrum.
– Competencies (= Knowing how to be): Competencies constitute the ability to apply knowledge, skills, and, in general, all one’s capabilities to plan the more complex actions of one’s life (knowing how to relate to others in a work environment, managing a work project, searching for a new educational path, etc.).
What does your child need to grow? All three of them; in fact, I will explain how to strengthen them all. While I delve more into the details of competencies elsewhere, where I emphasize their importance in achieving independence, now I want to talk to you about the interaction between knowledge and skills. Because your goal is to understand which skills to value.
2. Knowledge and skills between learning and experimentation
Let’s start the journey from the beginning. When your child reads a chapter of history (e.g., the Mesopotamian peoples), they are testing themselves on various aspects: they exercise skills they already possess (reading, memorization, etc.), they apply knowledge they already have (they have already studied the Sumerians and know what structure to expect when dealing with the Babylonians: social, political, religious structure, etc.), they leverage connections between what they know and the new information to learn the lesson.
All of this represents the process of learning, that is, the acquisition of information. The stronger the connections, the more solid the learning.
Information in the human mind is not processed like inside a computer; it is subject to continuous transformations and adjustments. This processing produces an individual’s knowledge.
And what about skills? You will discover what they are shortly; what’s important to know first is that they imply the ability to apply knowledge, to put it into practice.
Therefore, putting the child in a position to experience new skills, new contexts, and new situations is the most effective strategy to help them become more competent in a specific area (sports, academics, professional field, etc.).
3. Which skills to foster in your child to make them more competent
Now we can try to answer the question posed at the beginning. To understand which skills are important to develop in a child, it is necessary to start from their personality; the way we interpret this aspect inevitably influences the choice of skills and, consequently, the effectiveness of the help we intend to give the child.
In this sense, Clinical Pedagogy is very helpful because it identifies the structure of personality based on a model easily applicable in educational interventions, the bio-psycho-operational model.
I won’t go into the details of the technicalities; I will only tell you that this model includes a personality structure consisting of three components: a bodily component, a psychic component, and an operational (or praxic) component.
While the first two components do not require much additional explanation, as they are quite intuitive, I prefer to explain the third one more thoroughly.
So, as you will easily understand, the human personality is made up of both biological and psychological aspects. These two aspects somehow influence each other; if nothing else, because everything that is psychological is based on a biological structure, without which there would be no thought.
Beyond this, there is an aspect that not everyone takes into due consideration, and it concerns the interaction of the bio-psychological components that allows a person to act on the environment in a complex way.
This is the operational dimension and concerns praxis. Designing is one of the functions that fall within this dimension; another is problem-solving; yet another is planning a sports action (dribbling a defender and aiming at the goal to try to score a goal). More generally, this operational aspect specifically concerns “knowing how to do.”
This model allows us to identify the skills to be brought out in the child, which we can describe as follows:
– Biological skills: organic (physical health, nutrition, etc.) and motor (training, coordination, etc.).
– Psychological skills: emotional mind (emotions, affections, relationships, social skills, feelings, etc.) and rational mind (i.e., related to learning: reading, writing, math, study methods, etc.).
– Operational or praxic skills: these are all the skills that the child applies in interaction with their environment, such as: devising and implementing projects; coordinating movements, thoughts, and actions in a project; performing sequences; adapting work to a pattern; undertaking activities, etc.
Some children, as well as many adults, have significant difficulty in coordinating movements and thoughts, but if the help they receive as children allows them to refine coordination, then the operational dimension develops more harmoniously and allows the child to be much more effective in all aspects of their life.
Needless to say, all these skills should be helped in a child; furthermore, it is useful to help the child bring out the skills that represent their personal attitudes or talents, allowing them to develop them to the fullest.
4. How to best promote independent use of skills in your child
The last aspect worth reflecting on concerns the leverage that allows the child to constantly refine their skills, autonomously.
This leverage depends on the solidity they have developed over time, which has led them to feel confident in their abilities; because only in this condition will they feel stimulated to take on challenges and experiment with themselves.
How can we help them unleash their potential? The answer is very simple: by providing them with the comfort they need in moments of difficulty.
For a child, especially if they are young, receiving the right comfort from the people who care for them is an extraordinary formative experience because it puts the child in a position to feel protected.
This sense of protection drastically reduces the possibility that internal discomfort may insinuate and grow within them. Moreover, it enables them to cultivate greater self-esteem as they mature over time with the ability to comfort themselves in moments of need; precisely due to the increased capacity for self-control that is nurtured within them.
This puts them in a position to develop strong resilience, which is necessary to effectively face the challenges related to acquiring new skills, the uncertainties of new discoveries, and the need to put themselves to the test, all of which are characteristic of growth.
As a result, a more resilient child is in the ideal condition to fully and without hesitation experience the use of their abilities, both in school and in all other areas of their life.
They will be able to engage in studying, sports, friendships, work, or discussions with others from a privileged position, essential to acquiring all the necessary competencies and making the most of them for their own fulfillment.
