Balancing youth with social and emotional skills

By Donato Speroni. Social and emotional skills play an essential role during all stages of life.  Along with cognitive and learning abilities, it is equally important that our youth develop social and emotional skills in order to balance and ground their personalities and strengthen their characters. This blog post on a new OECD publication,  "Skills for Social Progress",  was written by Lynda Hawe of the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills, as part of our focus on youth well-being during the Wikiprogress online consultation on Youth Well-being.
As we know from personal experiences, when we feel a deep sense of well-being we are far better able to absorb new information, take risks and be more responsible for our lives.  Now don’t we want that for all youth?   But growing-up can often be quite a challenging period.  Ensuring that youth have a wide variety of skills to help them cope with some of life’s challenges may not always occur naturally.  Sometimes they will need help in building social and emotional skills - which are the kind of skills involved in achieving goals, working with others and managing emotions.

More Information

Centre for Educational Research and Innovation CERI

Education and Social Progress project

OECD Skills Strategy

Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies PIAAC website More...