The term appears in official circulars, calls for projects and team meetings, and many youth professionals work on these skills without naming them. I propose to define it here: where it comes from, what the French classification into nine skills contains, why empathy is its foundation. Three things follow for practice: these skills can be built at any age, they depend on conditions as much as on individuals, and professionals’ own skills are at stake as much as young people’s.
An anti-smoking programme, then a WHO definition
In 1980, the American psychologist Gilbert Botvin and two colleagues published in the journal Preventive Medicine the results of a school programme designed to delay the first cigarette among school-age adolescents. The expression appears in the article’s title: life skills training. Botvin and his team started from an observation: explaining to adolescents that smoking is dangerous does not stop them from starting. With their programme, they trained the adolescents in something else: resisting peer pressure, making decisions for themselves, coping with the anxiety of a social situation. This way of working spread throughout prevention. The phrase “enhancing life skills” figures in the 1986 Ottawa Charter, the founding text of health promotion. In 1993, the Division of Mental Health of the World Health Organization published a document on life skills education in schools, with a definition that still serves as a reference: life skills are there “abilities for adaptive and positive behaviour that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life”, and the rest of the definition concerns the ability to maintain a state of mental well-being by behaving appropriately in one’s relations with others, one’s culture and one’s environment. In French, the first renderings were “aptitudes indispensables à la vie” and “compétences utiles à la vie”; it is “compétences psychosociales”, psychosocial skills, that prevailed, together with a list of ten abilities presented in pairs: solving problems and making decisions, thinking critically and thinking creatively, communicating and being skilled in relationships, being self-aware and having empathy for others, managing one’s emotions and one’s stress.
The child psychiatrist Marie-Noëlle Clément, who heads the children’s day hospital of the CEREP in Paris, pointed out the word “effectively” in this definition on 27 November 2025, during a regional seminar of the Limousin youth judicial protection service that I was facilitating. The definition can be read in two ways: one in which psychosocial skills serve the person’s fulfilment, the other in which they serve their adaptation to society’s norms. In her words, “there is always this tension between what will do the person good, how they will be able to trace their own path, and what does society good.” Both versions exist in the texts and in the practices, and I do not believe we have to choose. Professionals who support young people in difficulty work precisely within this tension: helping them adapt enough to get by, without giving up on the person becoming more fully themselves.
Three families, nine skills
In 2022, Santé publique France published a review of the scientific evidence in which the definition and the classification were updated. Psychosocial skills there become “a coherent and interrelated set of psychological capacities”, cognitive, emotional and social, through which a person gains in the power to act, maintains their psychological well-being and builds more constructive relationships. It is this classification into three families that is now found in official texts, and I set it out here with what I understand of it from my workshops:
- Cognitive skills. Self-awareness, first, which consists in knowing one’s strengths and limits, knowing that one can be influenced, having an opinion of oneself, taking care of oneself. Self-control, next, which is not the same thing: managing one’s impulses, setting oneself a goal, planning to reach it. We think of it in relation to violence; the capacity to sustain a project over time is just as much part of it. Finally, constructive decision-making: making choices, solving a problem with creativity. I dwell on this last one, because creativity is a social risk. Daring to offer something of oneself to others means exposing oneself to judgement, and almost everyone, myself included, finds this difficult. Yet it is in this difficulty that self-confidence and social legitimacy are built.
- Emotional skills. Awareness of one’s emotions and one’s stress, that is, identifying and understanding them. We readily confuse what we are with what we feel. An angry young person believes that anger says who they are, and settles into opposition as into an identity. Emotions pass through us; they do not say who we are. Putting a word on the emotion I am experiencing is already a way of gaining some distance from it. Then comes the regulation of emotions: how I deal with my anger, my sadness, and also my joy, which can be managed very badly. Then stress management, which is a matter of everyday organisation: how I prepare for a situation that could become stressful.
- Social skills. Constructive communication, where empathy returns: listening, asking for something to be rephrased when one has not understood, knowing how to give someone feedback. Developing constructive relationships: going towards others, cooperating, helping one another, setting one’s ego aside for the good of the relationship and of the group. And resolving difficulties: knowing how to ask for help, which is one of the hardest things there is, knowing how to refuse, and making something of a conflict instead of enduring it.
These groupings are, for me, tools for thinking. Putting more precise words on what we do with young people helps in designing a project and, in the field, in understanding what is happening. In the document it published in March 2024 on the place of psychosocial skills in its educational work, the Direction de la Protection judiciaire de la jeunesse lists the difficulties most often encountered by the young people it follows: a fragile motivation that takes the form of inertia or aggression, discourses of discouragement and self-deprecation, difficulty in bearing a refusal or a deferred answer, poor self-knowledge, a school career strewn with failures, the need to keep one’s place among deviant peers. Read with the grid above, each of these difficulties can be reread as a skill that has been insufficiently built, and therefore as a skill that can be. Reading in this way erases nothing of the difficulties; it changes what can be done with them, and it also protects against wear, because one no longer takes personally what one has understood as a thwarted development.
Empathy, the foundation of psychosocial skills
Marie-Noëlle Clément works with the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron within the Petits Laboratoires d’Empathie, and I have been collaborating with both of them for many years. Empathy appears in the WHO list, and it is found in the French classification in the form of empathic listening; Marie-Noëlle Clément makes it the foundation of all the other skills, and I share this position, because empathy is the very construction of the person in their relationship to others and to themselves. She defines empathy in three dimensions: understanding what the other person is experiencing, being touched by what they are experiencing, and doing something helpful with that understanding. Serge Tisseron has modelled the construction of empathy in stages, the hull, the deck and the funnel of a boat, and I have set out this model in detail in the article The boat of empathies. I retain two elements from it here for the definition of psychosocial skills:
- The first is self-empathy. Empathy for oneself is built through the same stages as empathy for others: identifying one’s own emotions, caring about one’s own well-being, understanding one’s own mental states, projecting oneself into a coming situation in order to prepare for it. They are two sides of the same coin, and this is why so-called emotional skills and so-called social skills cannot be worked on separately, since what looks like personal development has social effects, and what plays out in a group has effects on the construction of each person. It is also why group dynamics matter as much, in my workshops, as what each person does there.
- The second is that it is never too late. A professional asked Marie-Noëlle Clément, that 27 November, what can be done when certain stages were missed in early childhood, with a fifteen-year-old. Her answer: there are favourable periods, ages at which an acquisition comes more easily, but nothing closes for good; “with older ones, we can go back over stages that should have happened with babies”, through motor imitation, putting words on emotions, symbolic play, because the brain remains plastic. It is slower, it calls for more creativity, and it often goes through mediations, art, sport, play, which make it possible to reach what cannot be tackled head-on at that age. I say it to the teams I work with: what we do serves a purpose, and it is not me saying so, it is the child psychiatrists.
The environment counts as much as the person
The Protection judiciaire de la jeunesse, in its 2024 document, distinguishes three dimensions that interact: young people’s individual abilities, professionals’ stances, and environments and living places. I hold to this formulation because with it we avoid over-psychologising. Beyond the question of whether a given young person, or I myself, have these skills, there is the question of the conditions we put in place so that they can be exercised and so that empathy can unfold.
An example I often give. A group of young people is taken to the theatre or the museum. They are a little boisterous, and on arrival the front-of-house staff put them in their place harshly. They have just suffered an aggression, in the psychological sense, and to go on existing they have to protect themselves, and so batten down the hatches. From then on, the artistic proposal made to them can no longer reach them, whatever its quality. Some will say the young people are responsible, or that the staff are; I believe both are, and that the question that concerns me is different: what can I, who am accompanying this group, do so that the journey, the wait, the arrival are thought through in the same way as the show? Perhaps do fewer things, or more modest ones. Psychosocial skills play out across the whole journey, not only in the workshop or the performance, and there is nothing magical about a cultural project: much can be done with culture, and deplorable things can also be done with a cultural project. Conversely, when the outing goes well because the professionals on both sides organised themselves, it durably marks the young people’s experience, and it is there that they build their relationship to others. Social empathy is educated in both directions.
This example also shows why professionals’ psychosocial skills are at stake as much as young people’s. The front-of-house staff who react brusquely have not thought through their reaction, and it harms everyone, themselves included. Helping young people develop their skills necessarily touches our own: our capacity to name our emotions, to bear a group not doing what we had planned, to welcome disagreement. This is why Promotion Santé Nouvelle-Aquitaine, when it presented in Limoges the criteria for effective interventions, put work with professionals first, before work with young people, then an active and experiential pedagogy, then the design of spaces that give a feeling of safety. We cannot ask professionals to support the development of young people’s psychosocial skills without giving them the conditions to work on their own: time for training and for practice analysis, communities of practice. And taking care of one’s own inner life, as Marie-Noëlle Clément says, is a professional skill, not a luxury.
Naming it, or doing it without saying so
Samera Zemani, technical adviser for health promotion at the regional directorate of the PJJ in Limousin, said it in closing the interprofessional seminar of 12 January 2026: “we all do psychosocial skills”, informally, without naming them. This is true of educators, teachers, care workers, cultural facilitators. The theoretical framework comes afterwards, and it serves to name, to connect, and to share between colleagues and between institutions what each was doing in their own corner.
Should we, directly with young people, spell out the skills being worked on? It depends, and I have no rule. A situation I experienced in a training course illustrates the risk. During a training course for educators that I was leading with Serge Tisseron, an outside speaker arrived one afternoon before a group that had already begun working together and knew one another, and started with long instructions: be kind to one another, do not judge each other, listen to each other. The group exchanged glances. All of that was already working between us, and she had not seen it, because she had not listened to the people she had come to meet. Someone eventually raised a hand to tell her we could get going. What she thought she was laying down as a framework was received as condescension. With adults, it was settled in one sentence; with young people, being taken for incapables who need to be told how to behave would have done damage. Conversely, when a group has been through something together, putting words afterwards on what happened can be extremely rich, because the words then settle on an experience rather than taking its place. I described this dialectic in the article Action or information ?, and in Developing Psychosocial Skills Through Artistic Practices the way I build short creative workshops so that experience precedes speech.
Two words I use with caution in this field. The first is “valorisation”, the praising and showcasing of achievement. To speak of valorisation is to speak of hierarchy, and it is hierarchy that is violent: a first prize presupposes a last one. What we do with young people is self-construction, and a moment of praise is far more ephemeral than a construction. The second is “results”. Empathy is built in stages, as we have seen; the only thing we work on, in a cultural project serving psychosocial skills, is a process. If the film or the show that was planned does not materialise but there has been a good process, the project is a success. And if the people in a group hold opposing opinions, that too is something to preserve. I often say it to young people: we have the right to disagree. Our democratic system rests on controversy; the Assemblée nationale is made of it. A group that believed it had to agree at all times in order to function would not be developing social skills, it would be learning to keep quiet. Welcoming disagreement without anyone losing their dignity is perhaps, of all the skills on the list, the one that asks the most of the adults who accompany them.
