5 Things Your Kids Should Focus on This Year

As parents, we’re always monitoring our children’s grades and test scores, trying to ensure their success. But good grades aren’t the only building blocks of well-rounded, successful, happy young adults. What can you help him or her focus on, besides the obvious? Here are our 5 tips for items to focus on this school year:

#1 – Honing Their Skills

Mastery of a subject is not enough to ensure success in college and career. Success requires specific skills, often referred to these days as “21^st Century Skills.” Top skills on our list include:

• Communication
• Collaboration and teamwork
• Critical thinking and problem solving
• Creativity
• Leadership

Employers’ lists also often include additional skills like technical proficiency, decision-making, prioritization, and accountability.

Today’s educators are focusing more and more on these 21^st century skills in their lesson plans and teaching approach. As you evaluate your child’s progress this year, focus not only on scores, but on the key skills that will serve them well in life. Augment schoolwork with life lessons at home.

#2 – Time Management and Life Balance

Our children’s schedules are jam-packed these days, with school, extra-curricular activities, and social engagements. Time management is a critical skill to acquire now, and will continue to be instrumental throughout life.

It’s easy for us to become stressed and overloaded with our schedules – at any age. Achieving life balance and a sense of control will go a long way toward providing peace of mind.

Help your children balance their own schedules by teaching them to budget time wisely, establish a realistic routine, and stick to it. Organization and efficiency are critical components of good time management.

#3 – Finding Their Passion

Students have probably been urged to think about their future job since a young age—“what do you want to be when you grow up?” But have they been urged to think about their passion? What sparks and intrigues them? What type of activity are they drawn to, without even thinking about it?

Composer, musician, and philanthropist A.R. Rahman said, “Success comes to those who dedicate everything to their passion in life.” Fascination, enthusiasm, and a “sense of calling” are significant motivators, kindling the desire to learn and explore – and ultimately producing the perseverance required for success.

Remember that your child’s specific passion may be something you’ve never thought of – and not what you may have secretly hoped they‘d pursue. Expose them to as many activities and subjects as you can. It will be easy to recognize when something captures their imagination.

After you help your children identify their passions, look for ways to help them investigate and channel these passions into concrete directions. If they happen to change their course as they discover new things, don’t get in their way.

#4 – Real-Life Experience

The knowledge we gain in school is invaluable, but a significant portion of our education actually takes place outside of the classroom. Help your kids think about the experience and knowledge they acquire from “real life.” They should pay attention to interactions between people, to differences in places and cultures, and to the ways in which successful adults apply their school-learning to their jobs and life.

#5 – Being a Kid

All this talk about future success…it’s pretty heavy stuff. Neither you nor your children should forget that they are, after all, kids. In these years, they’re building memories they’ll carry with them forever. Make sure they have time to be kids and to be themselves, enjoying their social lives and their events, and experiencing the thrill of simply discovering life.