Book Smart is not the (Only) Goal

 It’s no surprise that Albert Einstein was not a huge fan of school. Though he later lectured at universities around the world and changed the way we think about science, he struggled as a student in school. As Einstein points out in the quote above, school is extremely important, but so is the learning children do outside of school. In her book, Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs , Ellen Galinksy writes, “It is clear that there is information children need to learn – facts, figures, concepts, insights, and understandings. But we have neglected something that is equally essential – children need life skills.”

What are these life skills? Why does your child need these life skills? How can they gain and practice these life skills?

I’ve written about Executive Function Disorder (EFD) in the past, and Galinsky actually pinpoints these life skills within the range of executive functions. What do I mean by executive function? In their book, Executive Skills in Children and Adolescents, Peg Dawson and Richard Guare explain:

Executive skills allow us to organize our behavior over time and override immediate demands in favor of longer-term goals. Through the use of these skills we can plan and organize activities, sustain attention, and persist to complete a task. Executive skills enable us to manage our emotions and monitor our thoughts in order to work more efficiently and effectively. Simply stated, these skills help us to regulate our behavior.

Among the individual skills that allow people to self-regulate are:

• Planning: the ability to create a roadmap to reach a goal. This also includes the ability to focus only on what is important.
• Organization: the ability to keep track of multiple sets of information and materials.
• Time management: the ability to understand how much time one has, and to figure out how to divide it in order to meet a goal.
• Working memory: the ability to hold information in mind even while performing other tasks.
• Metacognition: the ability to self-monitor and recognize when you are doing something poorly or well.
• Response inhibition: the ability to think before you speak or act.
• Sustained attention: the ability to attend to a situation or task in spite of distraction, fatigue or boredom.

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