I often lecture on the development of children’s life skills. When I talk about learning skills in pre-school children, I am asked what all children should know at what age.

Comparing to age is based on a previously strongly held notion of so-called normal development. However, I would like to shift the perspective of normative thinking more towards whether a child has sufficient skills to participate in the activities of their peers in various everyday situations.

As the child participates, he or she is constantly learning new life skills. Instead of focusing on the normal age-based approach, we should focus on whether the child needs support, how much support, and what kind of support they need to learn new life skills, especially to participate in peer activities in different everyday environments.

Skills are displayed in relation to the demands of the environment

So what are the skills that a child needs to practice and learn in life? Different skills have been defined from many different conceptual and theoretical perspectives. Skills are often confused with the child’s abilities (for example, perceptual-motor abilities, cognitive abilities, psychological abilities) or with the success of entire everyday tasks (for example, the ability to go to the toilet independently). When examining skills, attention should be paid to the quality of the activity and how skillfully or intensively the child commits to the activity and activity at hand. Skills are observable learned actions that the child does when he or she acts and participates in various activities in his or her everyday life. The environment in which the child is acting and in what kind of environment he or she is acting places different demands on the child’s skills. In a limited environment at home, activities may already go well, but in a new and unfamiliar environment, the same activity requires in particular the ability to adapt what he or she has learned to this new situation.

In different environments, the same tasks change their nature and complexity as the environment changes. For example, an adult can think about how making coffee in a familiar environment at home is a routine without consciously thinking about how to do it. But when you go to a strange kitchen to do the same familiar activity, you immediately have to adapt your own actions more actively and the process of action is interrupted or slowed down when the environment is strange. You have to use your ability to adapt your own actions or change the environment to your own way of doing things.

A child needs sufficient motor skills to be able to dress, climb, use a fork, draw, ski or even play hopscotch. However, doing also requires ideation, planning and evaluation of one’s own actions. We often forget to look at a child’s so-called process skills, which are needed to move the action forward. How do I figure out what to do and how flexibly do I do it and whether I am able to adapt my own actions to the challenges of the environment if necessary.

The child must share his/her ideas for the activity with others in order to get his/her friends involved in the joint activity. Or he/she must be able to flexibly join the ongoing activity himself/herself. For example, when a child reads the play cues given by other children while playing and responds to them in an appropriate way, he/she gets involved in the play. The child’s identity as an actor is built in relation to his/her own experience, how he/she succeeded in what he/she did, and the feedback he/she received from his/her peers. When receiving positive experiences, from his/her own activities and when working with peers, the child maintains his/her enthusiasm for learning new things.