Why Children Must Learn Communication Skills

Communication skills impact upon a child’s ability to listen, understand and express themselves. These skills are fundamental to problem solving and maintaining relationships. It has a big impact on their future and the quality of their life.

Of course learning vocabulary and sentence structure is important but having a two-way interactive communication which is clearly understood by both parties is a fundamental skill that must be learned for basic English skills to become easy to grasp.

Beyond English, communication is relevant in every academic subject and for children to be able to get the most out of their education.

The communication charity Ican claims research suggested that at least 10% of primary school children – particularly those in deprived areas – have communication difficulties that are not being picked up and addressed until they are picked up in the youth justice system.

By engaging our pupils in rich, active confident communication they will weave those skills into their education and will be able to express themselves freely, openly and articulate their thoughts and feelings.

Speech, language and communication problems are the most common childhood disability and in terms of how a child’s brain develops, there is a window of opportunity when their brains most easily learn these skills. It’s important that the improvements are not left too late.

The longer communication problems go unaddressed, the higher the likelihood that there will be an affect on academic success later on. Only 15% of children with communication difficulties go on to achieve 5 A* to C GCSEs (compared with 57% of all other young people.) For this reason it is safe to say that good communication skills have an influence in how well educated a child will become, they kind of job they will do, how much money they will earn and whether they are going to be investing in society or relying upon it to support them financially.

Communication plays an important part in how children learn to socialise as well as how well they learn. Therefore communication can influence how well they cope later in life. It’s also worth mentioning that an important element of communication skills is not just what we project out to others, but also the quality of our own internal conversation – our thoughts.

Having positive internal communication is an important element in maintaining good mental health and well being. Often those who experience depression, anxiety and stress are communicating internally in very negative ways and this creates a snow ball effect to their problem. It means they can quickly feel out of control and the long term consequence of this can be quite damaging for mental well being.

When people communicate clearly, it tends to be because they are thinking clearly too. The longer term impact of this is less conflict between individuals and groups. Families can become more harmonious and classrooms become calmer places making learning more likely to happen. An entire community can benefit from a change in one school.

By Gemma Bailey
https://nlp4kids.org/