How are you building your child’s soft skills?

Build your child's soft skills with young engineers Warwick

The national curriculum plays a vital role in shaping your child’s academic foundations. However, reports over the past 3 years are highlighting how much it can fall short when it comes to providing comprehensive education on essential soft skills such as problem-solving, team building, and analytical thinking. 

It’s important for us to explore the significance of these skills. Let’s discuss how you as parents and guardians can actively supplement your child’s development in these areas.

The importance of soft skills

Soft skills are critical for long term success in both personal and professional aspects of our lives.

Problem-solving abilities equip individuals to tackle challenges creatively. Whilst team building nurtures cooperation, empathy, and effective communication.

Analytical thinking enables individuals to dissect complex problems and make informed decisions.

Developing mindset skills, such as positivity and flexibility goes a long way when young people come face to face with difficult challenges. 

Many of these skills often help us to bounce back or simply keep an open-mind. And despite their significance, the national curriculum tends to prioritise academic subjects, leaving minimal room for the development of these crucial skills.

Increasingly employers are looking for softer skills and experiences. Looking for ways that demonstrate that emerging talent can flex and fit into their cultural environments.

 

So how can you build opportunities to develop soft skills?

Parents – you play a pivotal role in supplementing your child’s soft skills development. Here are a few effective strategies you can apply now:

  1. Encouraging problem-solving

    When something doesn’t go to plan encouraging your child to solve real-life problems is an easy way to provide them with an opportunity to think critically. They will also learn to make decisions and find innovative solutions. This can be achieved through play. Engaging in puzzles, brain teasers, and age-appropriate challenges can enhance their problem-solving abilities.

    It can also be achieved in everyday life, for example, missing a school bus causes a knock-on effect, whereby you now have to drive your child to school. Spending time to discuss why the bus was missed and how to avoid missing it, can be a simple way to develop solution-finding skills. Discussing how to avoid the missed bus, might spark suggestions in your young person’s mind, with ideas such as planning the night before, getting up earlier or setting alarms and timings.

  2. Fostering team building

    Encouraging teamwork and collaboration may be achieved by involving your child in group activities. Sports, clubs, community groups, or even household tasks can promote teamwork, teach compromise, and develop social skills. When roles and responsibilities are discussed, your young person is able to build an understanding of how their actions can impact others around them. In turn helping them to build awareness and consideration.

  3. Cultivating analytical thinking

    Do you know if your child engages in activities that stimulate analytical thinking? Puzzles, logic games, scientific experiments, and discussions about current affairs may help to develop their skills further. Building skills that enable them to analyse information, evaluate evidence, and form logical conclusions.

    As we play puzzles or games that engage our analytical thinking, we are reinforcing how quickly the brain processes information. Some games focus on finding patterns, whereas others can improve memory. As these skills develop they become transferable. Building these skills can support other activities such as revision and exam preparation for academic studies.

  4. Promoting communication skills

    Communication is essential for success in every sector or discipline. Creating safe environments where your child feels comfortable to express their thoughts, ideas, and opinions confidently can be key to building the ability to freely do so as an adult.

    Engaging in conversations, storytelling, debating, and participating in drama or public speaking activities can enhance and build their communication skills. Whilst communication can be built in through formal clubs and groups, again our everyday environments provide us with a whole range of opportunities to encourage our young people to talk to us and tell us about their day. Sometimes the simplest options can be the most effective in building lasting soft skills.

  5. Emphasising emotional intelligence

    Teaching your child to identify and manage their emotions as well as empathise with others can be one of the most overlooked soft skills. Are you guilty of brushing highly emotional scenarios under the carpet?

    Providing a platform to recognise when they feel low or strongly about a specific topic can be the start to building soft skills in emotional intelligence. Simply discussing how to manage their views whilst also respecting diverse or opposing perspectives can be eye-opening. A conversation to review a situation where someone was upset, could be an accessible way to explore the topic.

  6. Nurturing creativity

    Developing your child’s soft skills in creativity can be achieved through artistic pursuits, such as painting, writing, music, or drama. Studies show that hands-on experience gives us a stronger sense of motivation, higher performance and creative ways to manage projects, execute and successfully deliver on time.

    Creative endeavours also provide opportunities to enhance problem-solving skills and abilities, foster self-expression, and nurture innovative thinking. A picture, after all, paints a thousand words!

  7. Fostering independence and resilience

    When things don’t go as expected, having developed soft skills in independence and resilience can give your child methods or tools to take responsibility for their actions, make decisions, and learn from failures. Being able to face challenges and feel supported enables young people to build soft skills in resilience, adaptability, and build their self-confidence. 

 

Filling the skills gaps

Whilst the national curriculum helps to develop knowledge and understanding of academic subjects, parents can actively supplement their child’s soft skills development. There is a whole range of soft skills that should be developed, both inside and outside of the classroom, such as problem-solving, team building, analytical thinking, and many other important skills. 

Advances in technology mean that traditional skills alone could put your child’s success as an adult on the back-foot, limit opportunities and cap earning potential in the working world. As a parent, or guardian, you play a significant role in your child’s holistic growth, therefore investing in the development of building soft skills which will equip them for success in all aspects of life should be a serious consideration. 

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