Life Skills Education: A Mechanism for Balancing Children’s Learning and Development

Abstract

The contemporary education lacks a balance between children’s learning and development, which impacts negatively on their character and makes them incapable of proffering solutions to problems of life. The aim of this study is to propose the introduction of life skills in all levels of education across the globe so as to help balance children’s learning and development by building character and resilience in learners. The study argues that by building these in children, they are equipped to thrive in a challenging world with or without their parents/guardians. Data are drawn from observation, internet secondary sources, and the responses of fifty oral participants engaged in telephone interviews on the subject matter. Qualitative method, critical discourse and content analyses, and descriptive and interpretive techniques are employed. The analysis shows that life skills have huge potentials in stock for child learning and development. The study concludes that having life skills education would mould children’s character, inculcate values and resilience into them, and balance their learning with cognitive and social development for remarkable academic performance, social relations, self-reliance and economic independence. Its major recommendation is that schools of all nations should sustainably introduce life skills education into their curricula.