What Are Executive Function Skills

The 7 Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs

Want to better understand how children learn and how we can take simple, effective steps to promote more engaged learning?

Want to better understand how children learn and how we can take simple, effective steps to promote engaged learning?

Mind in the Making shows what professionals, parents and caregivers can do—starting today—to strengthen the critical executive function skills in children. They aren’t the kinds of skills that children just pick up; these skills can be fostered to help children and the adults in their lives.

Executive function refers to the processes that involve managing thoughts, actions and emotions to achieve goals. The skills make it possible to consider alternative perspectives and respond to changing circumstances (cognitive flexibility), to keep information in one’s mind so it can be used (working memory), and to resist automatic and impulsive behavior (inhibitory control) so one can engage in goal-directed reasoning and problem solving.

Why are they so important? Higher executive function skills have been linked to success in school and life—health and wealth in adulthood—and have been shown to be even more important than IQ for future success. While science tells us that developing these skills is critical in the youngest years, they can be developed throughout life: it’s never too late!

What are MITM’s 7 Essential Life Skills?

Life skills are based on executive functions; they bring together our social, emotional and cognitive capacities to problem solve and achieve goals. Studies have found they are critical to success in school and life.

1. Focus and Self-Control

Children need this Life Skill to achieve their goals, especially in a world that is filled with distractions and information overload. It involves paying attention, remembering the rules, thinking flexibly and exercising self-control

2. Perspective Taking

Perspective Taking goes far beyond empathy: it involves figuring out what others think and feel, and forms the basis of children understanding the intentions of their parents’ teachers’ and friends. Children who can take others’ perspectives are also much less likely to get involved in conflicts

3. Communicating

Communicating is much more than understanding language, speaking, reading and writing – it is the Life Skill of determining what one wants to communicate and realizing how our communications will be understood by others. It is the Life Skill that teachers and employers feel is most lacking today.

4. Making Connections

Making Connections is at the heart of learning: figuring out what’s the same, what’s different and sorting these things into categories. Making unusual connections is at the core of creativity. In a world where people can Google information, those who can see the connections will go beyond knowing information to using it.

5. Critical Thinking

Critical Thinking is the ongoing search for valid and reliable knowledge to guide beliefs, decisions, and actions.

6. Taking On Challenges

Life is full of stresses and challenges. Children who are willing to take on challenges (instead of avoiding them or simply coping with them) do better in school and in life.

7. Self-Directed, Engaged Learning

It is through learning that we can realize our potential. As the world changes, so can we, for as long as we live—as long as we learn.

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The 7 Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs