Blog: Life skills equip children to manage their emotional well-being

“Isn’t everything we learn in life, a life skill?,” questioned my best friend as I explained to him my Fellowship project. I didn’t have an answer. My project as part of the AIF Clinton Fellowship was to be able to streamline, compile and re-organise a Life Skills Curriculum for the "Balsena program" at my host organisation Shaishav, a child rights organisation. Over the course of the fellowship, I’ve reflected on the question “What are life skills?” through much thought, research, and deliberation and developed my own understanding of the same.

Life Skills may be viewed as a range of psycho-social and cognitive abilities that equip children to make informed decisions and choices, manage their emotional well-being and communicate effectively.These can be interpreted in many ways. It can consist of teaching children a functional hard skill such as riding the cycle or changing the light bulb or it can mean a vocational skill that teaches the children how to gain skills required to excel at a particular job. Life skills education represents a shift in educational focus from information to methodologies. Children are empowered with skills rather than knowledge, that can help them to function and make sound personal choices in areas of education, health, careers, and social interaction.

Life skills, as part of Shaishav’s "Balsena Program", aims to develop the internal capacities and behaviours of the children to make them responsible, socially aware and active citizens of the society. By inculcating values such as equality, friendship, religious tolerance amongst others through the engagement of children in activities, the children are encouraged to actively make decisions about matters in their own lives and surroundings. Ultimately, these communities of children, who are the future of India, shall learn to be change-makers in their communities and therefore, the country. Thus, it’s the “children leading change” at Shaishav.

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The necessity for the revitalisation of the content was urgent. The needs of the children have changed in the slums of Kumbharwada, and Shaishav was trying to deal with that. With everyone having or wanting 4G enabled phones, there was an urgent requirement to develop new content that was engaging, fun and contextually relevant. It needed to get the children out of their homes in the evening, away from the pull of television sets and mobile phones. So what did the children really want?

Three big events and a lot of planning helped bring in clarity and work in that direction. With patience and an uncanny ability to handle my anxiety, incessant questioning and huge doses of skepticism, my colleagues pushed me to try my hand at designing the activities, training the trainers, facilitation and conducting reflective feedback sessions. As a team, we brainstormed, piloted and assessed what activities and games worked and didn’t work with the children.

Slowly but surely, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, it all started to come together. I learned to take failure in my stride, forge through uncertainty and learned how to test and tweak the activities.

Working on this project taught me the importance of contextualisation of content to the demographic. All the activities found from the various resources must be customised and contextualised for the participants at all times. That is the true indicator of its efficacy and relevance. Change is a slow process but it begins now, in the everydayness of our thought process.

Life skills thus are the means to approach life through our thinking. This is what I’d tell my friend in response to his question.

(*A previous version of this article was originally published on August 2nd, 2018, by the American India Foundation)

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and do not reflect the views of ZMCL)