DEVELOPING LIFE SKILLS IN YOUTH

Life skills help young people navigate the challenges of everyday life. They enable them to develop into healthy, responsible, and productive adults. Adolescent life skills are central to psychological theories that aim to understand how skills and competencies develop. From a practical standpoint, the promotion of life skills has been identified as a key resource for enhancing positive and productive development in youth. As today's societies rapidly become ever more diversified both demographically and politically, our youth and adolescents face multifaceted challenges. What do these societal demands imply for the key skills that young people need to acquire? Answering this question is important not only for maintaining the quality of civic life and social cohesion, but also for enabling children and adolescents to develop into healthy, productive, and autonomous adults. Defining such skills can also improve our assessment of how well prepared young people are for life's challenges, and it can help us identify overarching goals for monitoring and evaluating education and intervention practices. Scholars, practitioners, and institutional administrators agree that having life skills help young people navigate these societal challenges, thereby contributing to their healthy, positive, and productive development. It is to define the key life skills in young people, identify their core domains, and review the theories and empirical evidence that address them and how they are acquired