Hard & Soft Skills Tweens Should Learn | Moms.com - Moms

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You may have heard the terms "soft skills" and "hard skills" in terms of translating what one learns in college to the workforce. It's important, however, to know that there are important skills that need to be worked on long before college or entry into the workforce after high school. It's important to give tweens the life skills they will need to be successful in high school, college, and beyond. The earlier we pass these skills onto our young people, the earlier they can start to master them, and the better they will fare in a world filled with challenges.

What Are Hard & Soft Skills?

Hard skills are generally those things that jump out at us when we talk about "life skills" - knowing how to cook, how to balance a checkbook, how to carry out one's own job. These are things that you learn, can be certified in, and that you can practice. Soft skills are harder to teach - these are the ways we engage with people - i.e. making eye contact while we're talking. They're also often areas where someone who is neurodiverse might struggle more. These are also skills that can be practiced - and it's very important to start this process early so that they become habit and part of someone's character.

Figure Out Which Skills to Teach

The first thing you'll want to do before coming up with a plan for how to teach soft and hard skills to your tweens is figure out which skills you want to make sure your tween knows by the time they leave your house. For example, you might want to make sure that your tween knows how to cook, grocery shop, do laundry, properly clean a kitchen and bathroom, change a tire, maintain a car, etc.

You'll also want to make sure your tween has those important soft skills employers are really looking for. According to Jennifer Liu's CNBC article, these skills include having a growth mindset, developing creativity, having cultural awareness, having communication skills, being a critical thinker, taking leadership, being able to focus, being innovative, storytelling skills, and innovative skills. Deanna Pate writes that the "top 5 most in-demand soft skills" are creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability, and emotional intelligence.

Michelle Myers mentions nine soft skills that go beyond those that are career-oriented. She mentions communication, eye contact, self-advocacy, flexibility and teamwork, resilience and problem-solving, work ethic, responsibility and organization, conflict resolution, and risk-taking in her piece on the most essential life skills for teens and tweens.

tween standing on paddleboard on river — Credit: Unsplash/Ben White

Experience Is the Best Teacher

Once you have your list of the life skills you want to impart on your tween, you need to figure out how you will teach those. How does a child best learn how to walk? She or he learns by attempting to walk and eventually walking. The best way for tweens to pick up those important soft skills - and many of the hard skills - is by being presented with the opportunity to develop those. A child will not learn to organize if organization is always done for them by someone else. Nor will she learn to lead if never given the opportunity to do so.

What opportunities can you think of for your child? Taking a cooking class, or taking on meal planning for one night a week will help develop cooking skills, but how does your tween develop good conflict resolution skills? How do they develop a knack for taking calculated risks? For some, the answers to these questions may come easily. For others, it may take some work on building their own soft skills and stretching their own comfort zones.

Be a Model for Your Tween

Children, teens, and even tweens learn a lot from watching what their parents, guardians, and other adults around them do. One of the best ways to model great communication skills for your own child is to be a great communicator yourself. One of the best ways to model ways to handle stress or problem-solve is to actively seek out ways in which you can improve these skills in your own life.

Allow Your Tween Some Space

Kids can't have opportunities for skill-building unless they have the freedom to develop those skills. There's a reason that helicopter parenting and lawnmower parenting styles have developed an extremely bad reputation. The more we clamp down our our kids, tweens, and teens in order to keep them safe or lessen their struggles, the fewer soft skills they tend to develop - and the more likely it is that they will have to develop these skills in college, or worse, on the job and on their own.

Instead, it's important to step back. That doesn't mean you have to ignore or forgo monitoring situations. However, if your child has trouble with a teacher, suggest your child talk to the teacher first. Practice what your tween might say in order to self-advocate. If your child has a big school project, ask them to show you what they plan on doing for it, or where they think they might struggle with it. If it's clear that they're struggle with organizing the project, ask pointed questions to help them come to a solution on their own, instead of sitting down to organize it for them.

The tween years are important for getting a head start on developing the skills that kids will need to have in order to grow into successful adults. While both soft and hard life skills can be acquired later, your child will struggle less if you get started on this now.

NEXT: Science Says Your Teen Still Needs You, Here's Why

Sources: CNBC, LinkedIn, Sunshine & Hurricanes

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About The Author

Ronda Bowen (34 Articles Published)

Ronda Bowen has been writing and editing professionally since 2008. She is mom to four children and leads a multi-level Girl Scouts troop. She also is the owner of the blogs Just a Secular Homeschooler, Activism My Way, and Wining Wife. In her spare time, she enjoys reading and playing board games. Her favorite thing to do with her kids outside of camping is conducting science experiments.