8 Social/Emotional Skills Kids Need to Master By Age 13

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I ran across and article that I shared an article on my Facebook page titled "8 Things Kids Need to Do For Themselves Before Age 13."  It was a nice list of functional life skills, and I agreed with the idea that our kids need to learn how to do laundry and pack a lunch. But as I read the list, I thought some things were missing, for sure. The original list was something like this:

1. Waking up in the morning

2. Making breakfast and packing their lunch

3. Filling out their paperwork

4. Remembering their often forgotten items

5. Handling their own failure to plan emergency

6. Doing their laundry

7. Emailing and calling their teachers and coaches

8. Managing in their academics

Missing from this list are vital emotional and interpersonal skills. With outstanding social skills, our kids can communicate their needs and get help with the functional tasks they don't know how to do. And being a grown up is about more that doing your own laundry; our kids need to clean up their own interpersonal messes, too. So here is my list of social/emotional skills I’d like to add to the basic life skills listed above:

8 Social/Emotional Skills Kids Need to Master By 13

1.  Choose kindness over popularity. We teach young kids to share and choose their words carefully, but teens face new pressures. Peers encourage them to exclude someone, or post a cruel comment on social media. During the early teen years, it’s important that we teach our kids how to do the right thing when faced with social pressure and resist the pull of the group in favor of being kind and inclusive.

2.  Recognize the harm from gossiping.   Teens are social creatures, and it's natural for them to want to talk about their experiences. But we have to teach them that gossip hurts. Younger teens may enjoy the social interaction and the the feeling of being on the “inside” of a juicy bit of gossip. But as parents, we need to encourage them to refrain from this hurtful practice.

3.  Name your feelings . Being able to name feeling prevents acting on them instead. Naming feelings is a vital skill for the teen years. And boy oh boy do the feelings come on strong when adolescence hits! This is the time to teach kids to express their emotions, and cope with them under guidance from a trusted adult.

4.  Stand up for what is right. Our children need to become people of principle as they enter the teens years. “Upstanding” is the practice of standing up for a victim in a bullying situation, and it has been shown to protect kids from many of the harmful effects of bullying. Standing up and speaking out are skills that need to be learned right along with the social cultural skills that are the center of adolescence.

5.  Walk away from trouble. Trouble can take the form of underage drinking, cheating on schoolwork, taunting a classmate on social media, or a wide range of other possibilities. If our teens face pressures to join in with “trouble” and they don’t have a plan, they may default to passively tag along. We have to teach our kids what to say in when trouble is afoot so they're prepared when they find themselves on the cusp of a friend's bad choice, or their own.

6.  Take responsibility for your mistakes. Nobody is right all the time. We have to teach our kids how to own their screw ups and make right their wrongs. Sure, we teach younger kids to say “sorry,” but the kids of mistakes kids make during the teen years require greater courage and preparation.

7.   Become skillful at trying hard. Hard work is a skill. Kids naturally choose what's easy most of the time. By 13, they need to learn the rewards of hard work. Whether we teach them to repair a car engine, or give their all to a school project, we need to offer young teens opportunities to experience the rewards of real effort.

8.  Know when to ask for help. This may be the most important skill of all for a teen: know when you need help, and know how to ask. Teens love their independence, but they need help sometimes. Keeping the dialogue open on easy days, and modeling asking for help, can be good ways to demonstrate and enhance this skill.

Posted on December 9, 2019 by Melissa Deuter.