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Nurturing Future Leadership Skills in Five to Eight Year-Old Children Through Self Awareness Activities

December 23, 2002 

"Leadership skills are essential for young people to feel satisfaction and contribute to society.  By youth helping themselves and others to realize and achieve their goals they are able to meet the demands of life in adulthood.  For young people to gain leadership skills they first must get to know themselves and others, that is, develop a sense of self or self-awareness. 

Yates and Youniss (1996), posit that for adolescents and adults to reach their leadership potential, they must understand themselves and develop a positive attitude about who they are, their values, and aspirations; in short, develop their sense of self.  According to Erikson (1968), this type of identity formation is an intersecting process of the individual and the community. 

Unlike adults, children do not have the mental capacity and the life experiences to participate in self-awareness training or therapeutic educational focuses that is encouraged for self-awareness development by child and youth care workers (Elsdon, 1998).  Other methods must be used with children that are appropriate for them at their developmental stage. 

We believe programs that promote life skills of self-awareness (self-esteem), social-interaction (getting along with others), and decision-making (making choices) are the building blocks for future leaders.  These life skills are not acquired magically overnight.  They begin to form early in life.  A study of 4 and 5 year-old children reported that when activities were introduced to increase the child's own awareness toward self and others (children and adults) their leadership and prosocial characteristics were advanced (Hensel, 1991).  Our program in Ohio, part of Ohio State University Extension (4-H Youth Development), has a primary objective of enhancing life skills of self-awareness through activities that engage children with others to better understand themselves and others.

Ohio's program is developmentally age-appropriate that nurtures beginning leadership skills in young children during their formative years.  It utilizes and experiential-based, discovery-learning curriculum for use in communities, schools, and or collaborative leadership programs.  The program follows the recommendations of the National Association of the Education of Young Children for Developmentally-Appropriate Practice (1988). 

A key aspect of the curriculum is its developmentally-appropriate design taking into account where five to eight year-old children are physically, socially, emotionally, and cognitively.  If ignoring where children are developmentally, the program would be too difficult or easy for its participants, therefore curtailing successful experiences for nurturing future leadership skills.  Children in this age group have unique abilities even though they develop at different rates.

The activities are organized in eight subject areas:  citizenship civic education, community expressive arts, consumerism family science, environment earth education, healthy life style, personal development, plants and animals, and science and technology.  Some examples of the activities include - 'how do you spend time?' in which children sit in a circle and share with each other about how they spend their time.  They are encouraged to look at how their parent(s) spend time and how much of their own time is spent on themselves and other individuals.  Additional examples include 'collecting food donations' and 'making thank you notes for donors.'  Children collect food for the local food pantry and write thank you notes to contributors.

Today, both volunteer and professional educators have used the OSU Extension curriculum and activities successfully with more than 45,000 five to eight year-old children in Ohio and other states.  Some of the settings include after-school childcare programs that utilize the material to engage children in their neighborhoods through adult-supervised community service.  Since early life experiences, even subtle ones, affect future development, young children are more likely to reach their highest potential later in life through community-oriented child programs.  By helping build self-awareness and other life skills in children we can enable them to lay a firm foundation for them becoming future leaders as adolescents and adults (Scheer & Safrit, 2001, p. 105-110)."

The Journal of Leadership Studies is available on loan from the OSU Leadership Center.  A complete listing of all the Leadership Center's resources is available on our website www.ag.ohio-state.edu/~leaders   FYI: the OSU Leadership Center is funded by OSU Extension.

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Created: 2008-01-16, Updated: 2009-02-17