Fostering soft skills is an incredibly valuable pursuit. Unlike soft skills, hard skills can be defined as technical skills learned through formal education. These include knowledge like chemistry, spanish, or language arts. Hard skills are the building blocks of scholastic education. Soft skills, on the other hand, are skills that create a firm foundation for a successful social and emotional life. Soft skills such as communication, responsibility, courtesy, professionalism, flexibility, and teamwork are essential building blocks for life due to their psychological, social, and interpersonal nature. However, due to their inability to be measured and graded, soft skills are often overlooked in our American educational system. Parents must take an active role in fostering the growth of soft skills in order for their children to succeed. The tips and advice here will make this important task easier.
Fostering Problem-Solving Skills
Problem-solving skills are important for the development of integrity, creative thinking, adaptability, and accountability. Without these skills, your child will likely struggle in school and later in the workplace.
Play Games
Play games that encourage your child to make out-of-the-box choices such as going on a scavenger hunt, completing a puzzle, and playing murder mysteries or doing escape rooms. By having to make their own choices rather than just picking from pre-set options, your child will be motivated to pay careful attention to both the events and context of the game in order to create their own choices that fit the circumstances. With enough practice, your child will become more comfortable analyzing situations and creating the best solution for any challenge.
Solve Household Problems
Encourage your child to take an active role in solving household problems. If there are leftovers that need to be put away, have your child pick a container that they think will be large enough for the meal. When you have to wash the car, ask your child questions about the logistics related to water supply, location, and the like. If your child is struggling to solve the whole problem at once, help them break it down into smaller sections. Don’t be afraid to provide suggested options to spark their thought processes or to point out additional factors that might complicate their solution to get them to think deeper. Make sure to encourage your child through this process to help them feel supported instead of frustrated.
Encourage Analysis
When reading books, watching movies or TV shows, or listening to music, you can start fostering soft skills like problem-solving by analyzing the message and themes with your child. Let them take the lead and support their thinking by providing context for events your child might not be familiar with such as breakups or job complications. For example, when reading a book with your young children, if the main character is upset by another character’s behavior, encourage your child to empathize by asking questions like: Why might the main character be upset? What can they do to feel better? What could the other person do to help fix the problem? For older children, encourage them to find more nuanced themes. For instance, if the main character in an action film must choose between saving their loved one or saving the world, encourage your teen to think through the moral and emotional themes. By analyzing the themes and messages that may not be overtly stated, you are encouraging your child to think deeply. Over time, your child will develop the ability to see difficult situations from multiple points of view.
Fostering Social Skills
Social skills are vital as they benefit people in every area of their lives. In school, social skills are necessary to make and keep friends. Later on in the workplace, social skills serve as a way to maintain professional relationships and connect with superiors. Social skills are the building blocks to compassion, communication, and successful relationships.
Start Conversations
Encourage your child to take the initiative to start conversations. At first, you may need to model how to start conversations in the appropriate settings. For example, when checking out at a grocery store, you can ask the cashier how their day is going and reply with thoughtful and engaging responses to keep the conversation going. Then, next time, encourage your child to start the conversation, increasingly guiding them toward more involved verbal interactions. These daily dialogues function as a training ground for your child to get comfortable initiating and maintaining conversations.
Include in Family Conversations
Family meal times can be a great way to practice navigating the flow of group conversations. Ask your child what they did during their day. If they don’t seem excited to share, ask how they liked specific things such as their lunch, after-school activities, or their friends. Group conservations are inevitable. At school, your child will be asked to participate in group activities such as playing on a team for P.E. and participating in group projects. Some children can get overwhelmed by multiple differing opinions and feelings. The goal is to encourage them to feel comfortable talking about their lives in a safe, nurturing environment. It also gives you as parents the opportunity to model active listening and good question asking. By modeling this flow of conversation in a safe environment, you are giving your child the opportunity to start fostering soft skills and practice managing their feelings in this new space.
Practice Active Listening
Active listening is essential in building and maintaining relationships of all kinds. Active listening is the art of deliberately taking in all of the information the speaker is providing to best understand their words and emotions. Teach your child how to actively listen by playing the role of the listener, modeling and narrating what you are doing as you do it: Tell your child to pay attention to the words that they are hearing. What is the information that is being conveyed? How does the speaker feel about this information? What is the speaker’s emotional reaction to what they’re talking about? Remind your child to take note of the nonverbal communication that may be occurring. Does the speaker look upset? Possibly happy or confused? Understanding nonverbal cues can help listeners understand the speaker’s emotional response. As your child develops active listening skills, they become better communicators, which will serve them well when making and maintaining relationships in school and the workplace.
Fostering Emotional Resilience
Emotional resilience covers a variety of skills that build good habits for emotional regulation, flexibility, teamwork, and accountability. Often overlooked, emotional resilience is a powerful skill that supports students by enabling them to withstand stressful situations such as final exams, interpersonal conflicts, balancing a full calendar, and daily homework stress.
Express Their Needs
In today’s busy society, children are often overlooked. This can make them feel unvalued, like their needs and wants don’t matter. Help your child make sure their needs are heard by teaching them how to speak assertively and respectfully. You can start by creating fill-in-the-blank sentence structures, such as, “I need to ___, can you help me?” or “I don’t like when ___. Please stop.” or “I would like to__”. Though your child’s request may not be fulfilled, teaching them to ask in a kind and confident manner teaches them that their needs are valuable and important. By teaching your children how to stand up for themselves, they gain confidence, determination, and resilience.
Encourage Emotional Regulation
Children are not born with the tools needed to understand and regulate their own emotions. It is your job as their parent to help them identify, understand, begin fostering their soft skills, and regulate their feelings. Validate their feelings by actively listening and holding space for their feelings. Try saying “That does sound ___. It makes sense that you feel that way.” After your child has calmed down, introduce new strategies to help them regulate their emotions in the future. For example, breathwork can bring calm to stressful situations. You can model box breathing, which involves inhaling for four seconds, holding the breath for four seconds, exhaling for four seconds, and waiting for four seconds before inhaling again. Providing a safe space for your child to process their emotions encourages robust emotional regulation and provides a firm foundation for the development of confidence.
Learn From Mistakes
Mistakes are inevitable. As a student, it is your child’s job to learn new information, attempt new skills, and make mistakes. Unfortunately, mistakes often come with the connotation of failure and embarrassment. As a parent, you can reframe mistakes as learning opportunities. For instance, in a long division problem, students are required to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. This daunting new procedure leaves a lot of room for error. Work with your child to identify what they did right, and allow them to walk you through their thought process. When they get to the part they made a mistake on, gently correct them, making sure to emphasize the parts they got correct and responding neutrally about the parts they got wrong. Try saying, “You did this section very well. I understand your thinking about this section. However, instead of X, try doing Y.” By creating a safe space for your child to learn and grow, you are able to reframe the embarrassment around mistakes as a natural part of learning. Over time, your child will become more confident and determined in their work, as mistakes no longer hold the same emotional weight.
Conclusion
Fostering soft skills is vital for building a successful educational and future workplace performance. Encourage problem-solving skills by playing open-ended games, involving your child in solving household problems, and encouraging your child to analyze the media they consume. Bolster their social skills by modeling and prompting them to start conversations, including your children in family conversations, and practicing active listening. Support the development of your child’s emotional resilience by teaching them how to assertively express their needs, techniques for emotional regulation, and how to learn from their mistakes.
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