Life Skills and Adolescent Mental Health

Can Kids Be Taught to Master Life?

Can school teach us to master life? This book confronts what the author sees as an ongoing trend in many Western democracies where citizens are increasingly being held accountable for their health and happiness.

The author believes that the introduction of life skills in school shows a tendency to place more responsibility on the individual rather than address fundamental societal flaws that really should be solved politically. It examines how such responsibility to psychologically deal with these problems affects our mental health and quality of life. This book questions the fundamentals of the life mastery curriculum where we might be risking the creation of just another arena where children have to perform, challenging readers to evaluate more closely the premises, consequences and limitations of life mastery.

The book, one of the first to question ‘life mastery’ as an achievable goal with critical reviews of the 21st century skills movement, will be of interest to psychologists, school counsellors, teachers, students, politicians, and any reader evaluating school curriculums in relation to the decline in youth and adolescent mental health.

‘Around the world, governments are now considering introducing life skills as a subject for children in schools. Norway has been a first mover, and, in this important new book, Ole Jacob Madsen critically discusses the dilemmas related to this development. This book is significant not just for readers interested in life skills curricula, but for anyone who wonders about the current replacement of political solutions to societal problems with psychological ones. Strongly recommended!’

Svend Brinkmann, Professor of psychology, Aalborg University, Denmark and Author of　Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze.