The Building Blocks Of Success
When raising a child, many parents often focus on developing their kid’s social and emotional skills—sometimes at the expense of other skills. After all, the ability to interact well with others and express emotions in a healthy manner is essential in life. However, cognitive skills—a child’s ability to process information, solve problems, and perform tasks—are equally critical. These skills enable children to understand the world and their roles within it.
In this article, we’ll discuss what cognitive skills look like in children, why they’re important, and how to teach them to kids. We’ll also provide detailed examples across different areas of children’s lives to emphasize how vital they are to children’s overall development and success.
What Are Cognitive Skills In Children?
Cognitive skills are the mental skills used to acquire knowledge, process information, and solve problems. These skills help children understand and interpret the world around them. That way, they can effectively interact with and respond to their environments.
Notably, cognitive skills build upon key cognitive functions. These functions include memory, attention, executive functions, language processing, and visual and spatial processing. Cognitive skills like critical thinking and problem-solving are developed through these functions, allowing children to receive information from the environment, understand it, and act upon it. For example, reading comprehension is a cognitive skill that builds on and applies cognitive functions like attention, memory, and language processing to make meaning of text.
According to Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, children’s cognitive skills grow over time. For instance, a 13-year-old’s cognitive skills are more advanced than that of an infant or a toddler. While a teenager can think abstractly and use deductive reasoning, a young child will struggle with logical thinking and abstract concepts.
Why Are They Important For Children?
Here are four illustrations of the important role cognitive skills play in children’s lives.
Cognitive Skills Provide The Foundation For Lifelong Learning
A child’s present cognitive skills are often strong indicators of their ability to expand upon those skills to achieve future learning outcomes. For example, research shows that infants who are better at distinguishing the building blocks of speech at six months are better at more complex language skills at two and three years old. They’re also better at gaining the skills for learning to read at four and five years old.
Cognitive Skills Support School Readiness And Academic Achievement
Children who have the appropriate cognitive skills are able to focus, sustain attention, retain information, and engage with the ideas of others. These are critical skills for those preparing to enter school, where concentration, comprehension, and intellectual engagement are central to student success. A study also found that cognitive ability can have a significant positive impact on academic achievement, with high information processing, logical reasoning, and other mental abilities positively influencing factors like students’ knowledge retention and knowledge mastery.
Cognitive Skills Shape Future Success In Life
A child’s ability to solve problems, reason, and make decisions are essential life skills, influencing how they’ll later navigate work, relationships, and other aspects of adulthood. A study even found that childhood cognitive ability is a significant predictor of adult financial well-being, further highlighting the relationship between cognitive skills and future success.
Cognitive Skills Prepare Students For A Competitive World
Cognitive skills are necessary for navigating an increasingly digitized, globalized, and automated world and workforce. According to the World Economic Forum’s 2023 Future of Jobs Report, analytical and creative thinking—both cognitive skills—are listed as the top two competencies that organizations consider core skills for workers. If future generations are to effectively respond to an ever-evolving world and workplace, then parents must continuously nurture their child’s cognitive skills in anticipation of major change.
What Are Examples Of Cognitive Skills?
Cognitive skills include critical thinking, logical reasoning, reading comprehension, quantitative skills, problem-solving, and more. Here, we define these skills and illustrate what they look like across various aspects of childhood.
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is the ability to analyze information and make judgments about it. It’s an essential skill for children because it enables them to think independently, draw connections between disparate ideas, and understand how their knowledge operates in the real world. Here’s how this skill might manifest in different areas of children’s lives:
- Home
Realizing they’ll have more time to play outside if they complete their chores early, considering the consequences of playing video games instead of completing their homework, thinking about nutrition when packing their lunch. - School
Considering different viewpoints in a class debate, identifying connections between lesson content and real life, and supporting essay arguments with evidence. - Social
Evaluating friendships by considering how those relationships make them feel, understanding why something is wrong, and reflecting on the results of their actions.
Logical Reasoning
Logical reasoning is the process of drawing conclusions from information. With logical reasoning skills, children can think through situations, anticipate outcomes, and make informed decisions. This cognitive skill materializes in children in the following ways:
- Home
Deciding to wear a rain jacket if it’s raining outside, deducing that one of their family members has gone out if a car is missing from the driveway, and understanding that a plate of food is hot if they see steam rising from it. - School
Predicting what comes next in a story based on character actions, using the process of elimination to answer multiple-choice questions, and forming a hypothesis based on their observations. - Social
Reasoning that their friend is upset because they’re frowning, developing a strategy based on previous outcomes to win a game, and understanding that something funny must have happened if they see a group of friends laughing.
Reading Comprehension
Reading comprehension is the ability to read, process, and understand text. Without this skill, children wouldn’t be able to derive meaning from what they’ve read, hindering their ability to follow written instructions, answer text-dependent questions, and take appropriate action. Examples of reading comprehension in children include:
- Home
Understanding what a word means based on context clues, following a recipe while baking with a parent, and comprehending written notes left by family members. - School
Correctly answering questions about assigned readings, writing book reports, and discussing the meaning of a poem in class. - Social
Summarizing a book to an acquaintance, reading and understanding the rules of a board game, and comprehending a message sent by a friend.
Quantitative Skills
Quantitative skills are the ability to use numbers to reason and make predictions. These skills allow children to analyze and interpret numerical information, which is critical for completing daily tasks and excelling in school and work. Children’s quantitative skills across various areas include:
- Home
Measuring ingredients for recipes, tracking how they spend their allowance, and calculating time spent on chores. - School
Solving math problems, being able to count, and reading and interpreting graphs. - Social
Keeping score during games, fairly dividing supplies among friends, and measuring and comparing distance during a footrace.
Problem-Solving
Problem-solving is the process of identifying a problem, brainstorming solutions, and taking appropriate action. Children adept at problem-solving persist instead of giving up, think creatively, and adapt to different situations—qualities that are necessary for nimbly navigating challenges in life. Here are a few ways problem-solving skills manifest in children:
- Home
Stacking blocks without them falling over, using a stool to reach an object that’s out of reach, and retracing their steps until they find a lost item. - School
Asking a teacher for help when struggling with a concept, breaking down a challenging word problem, and borrowing a pencil when theirs runs out of lead. - Social
Replacing a missing board game piece with an alternative item to continue playing, resolving conflict with a friend who wants to play a different game by suggesting they take turns, and getting help from an adult when they accidentally break a friend’s toy.
What Types Of Activities Promote Cognitive Skills?
Parents can nurture children’s critical thinking, logical reasoning, and other cognitive skills to foster intelligence, adaptability, and resilience. Below are examples of how they can do so.
- Playing with puzzles
According to research, puzzle games help children develop spatial reasoning and problem-solving skills, which allow kids to visualize problems, recognize relationships between objects, and navigate their physical environment. - Reading
Research has shown that parent-child reading promotes children’s early language growth. It also improves their vocabulary, spelling, and reading comprehension, setting the foundation for strong communication skills. - Exploring nature
A study found that nature play has positive impacts on children’s cognitive play behaviors. Furthermore, exploring the outdoors aids their visual and auditory processing skills and encourages critical thinking. - Asking and answering questions
Asking your child questions encourages them to think critically and creatively. It also allows them to practice their communication skills. Meanwhile, answering your child’s questions helps them learn from and consider different perspectives. - Sorting
Allow your child to sort objects based on color, object type, and other criteria. This will help them hone their perceptual, reasoning, and memory skills, which they’ll need for daily tasks, school, and work. - Reciting the alphabet
Because children’s knowledge of letter names and sounds is a major indicator of future reading and spelling abilities, regularly practicing the alphabet with your child is critical to their development. The activity also sharpens their memory and refines their written and oral communication skills. - Engaging in activities centered around your child’s interests
For example, if your child likes wizards, have them watch children’s videos featuring wizard characters. That way, when you ask them questions based on the videos, they’ll be more engaged and likely to answer them correctly.
Building On The Foundation Of Cognitive Skills
Cognitive skills play a significant role in children’s development. Critical thinking, reading comprehension, quantitative skills, problem-solving, and other abilities help children understand, interpret, and respond to their environment. They also lay the foundation for lifelong learning, prepare students for future success, and enable them to navigate a competitive world.
Parents can nurture their children’s cognitive skills by reading with them, exposing them to nature, and other activities. However, they shouldn’t stop there. In addition to cognitive skill development, parents should also cultivate children’s social and emotional skills. This will ensure children grow into well-rounded individuals capable of thriving at home, school, work, and in other areas of life.
