It always begins the same way. After a presentation, during a policy meeting, or in a donor discussion, someone asks a seemingly simple question: “What are the top five life skills we should focus on, and which ones should we measure to know whether a programme works?”
The question carries a promise of clarity, order, and direction in a field that often feels complex. Yet each time I hear it, I am reminded of the deep conceptual, methodological, cultural, and systemic paradoxes that continue to shape the global conversation on social and emotional learning.
The desire for simplicity is understandable. Education systems are under constant pressure to demonstrate measurable impact. Lists, frameworks, and tidy inventories appear helpful. They offer the comfort of structure in a developmental space that is inherently intricate. However, developmental science reminds us that human growth is ecological, relational, cultural, and never linear. When competencies like social and emotional development are forced into lists and categories, something essential begins to disappear. We lose the phenomenon itself.
Empathy, agency, emotional regulation, collaboration, and similar constructs do not function as isolated skills. They emerge through lived experience, cultural meaning-making, identity development, relationships, and daily interactions. A young person navigating conflict draws on memory, moral reasoning, emotional cues, relational trust, and cultural narratives, not on a single, neatly defined competency. Global reviews, including Hvalby’s analysis of life skills frameworks, show how intertwined these constructs are. Developmental theories describe them as ecological capabilities rather than individual traits.
This conceptual complexity gives rise to a methodological paradox. As SEL becomes simplified into lists, the field attempts to measure it with the precision used for academic indicators. Yet empirical work shows the fragility of this approach. A meta-analysis by Kim, Lim, and others illustrates how SEL effect sizes vary widely across contexts. The variation is not evidence of SEL having a limited influence. It reflects the limitations of trait-based tools, which cannot capture relational or contextual processes. Similarly, Loeb and colleagues, working with one of the largest school-level SEL datasets, found that SEL scores were highly sensitive to school climate, peer norms, teacher stress, and ecological factors. Measurement becomes a mirror of context rather than an indicator of stable traits.
A cultural paradox adds another layer. Many widely used SEL frameworks have been designed in Western contexts and emphasise constructs such as independence, assertiveness, and individual decision-making. These constructs are meaningful, but they are not universal. In many communities across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, young people display strengths through interdependence, relational attunement, collective responsibility, and humility. Research by Hoskins and Liu demonstrates how current SEL tools often fail to reflect these cultural orientations. As a result, children’s strengths may be misinterpreted as developmental gaps. SEL, intended to support human flourishing, can unintentionally narrow the definition of flourishing.
A systemic paradox emerges as well. The most significant barriers to young people’s thriving are often structural. These include rigid assessment cultures, emotionally unsafe school environments, stressed teachers, inequitable access to foundational learning conditions, and institutional practices that limit student agency. Yet programme design and donor expectations frequently focus on individual skill acquisition, because individual skills are easier to package, monitor, and scale. This creates a profound misalignment. Structural problems are met with individual solutions. Systems remain unchanged, while learners are asked to adapt to conditions that do not support their well-being.
Thriving requires environments that honour dignity, nurture agency, and recognise each learner’s humanity.
Sreehari Ravindranath
Taken together, these paradoxes suggest that a different orientation is needed. The capability perspective provides one such shift. It asks not what skills a young person possesses, but what a young person can be and do within the environment they inhabit. Thriving becomes a slow and meaningful expansion of opportunity. It becomes the freedom to imagine, to relate, to act, and to become. Thriving requires environments that honour dignity, nurture agency, and recognise each learner’s humanity.
Such environments are built on empathetic relationships, culturally grounded school cultures, safety, coherence, and a system-wide commitment to equity and inclusion. These conditions influence how young people understand themselves and the world. They shape identity, belonging, possibility, and learning. No list of top skills can substitute for an ecosystem that enables young people to feel seen, supported, and capable of imagining futures that feel authentic to them.
This is why the central question is not which five life skills matter most, or which ones should be measured. The real question is how we can create the ecological conditions that allow all young people to thrive. This requires a shift in measurement practices as well. Skills-based assessments have their place, but they need to be complemented by indicators that capture belonging, identity safety, relational trust, teacher wellbeing, coherence of school culture, perceptions of fairness, and community support. To focus only on individual traits is to read a single chapter of a much larger developmental story.
Ultimately, social and emotional development cannot be reduced to a list. It is a developmental, relational, cultural, and ecological phenomenon. If we want young people to flourish, to define success on their own terms, and to experience the freedom to imagine futures that resonate with their sense of self, our work must turn toward strengthening the environments that shape their everyday lives. Simplification may feel reassuring, but it cannot capture the richness, depth, or humanity of how young people grow.
Author’s Note:
I have intentionally not offered a definitive way forward. I believe it is essential for the field to sit with this question longer rather than rushing toward new frameworks or alternative forms of categorisation. The impulse to simplify and quantify is part of the very paradox I wish to highlight. I also recognise that I am part of this paradox. I co-create assessments, curricula, and pedagogical approaches. That is why this reflection matters deeply to me. It is a reminder to return to inquiry, humility, and the deeper purpose of enabling young people to thrive.
