When you’re a parent, there’s never enough planning that can be done. After all your supermom (or dad), and you’ve mastered the art of multi-tasking, conquered distance learning and kicked cabin fever in it’s teeth. 😂🤙🏾 And with the possibility of us having to go through it all over again. You maybe wondering, what’s next?
With your kid bound for another round of home fun – just claim it – you’ll thank me later, why not take some opportunities to inject some life skills learning into your at-home routine. A simple thing as preparing a meal with your child, shopping, or any routine that’s common in your home is a wonderful way to not only connect in a creative way, but also gives your children the skinny on how mom or dad does things. Oh, yes; they have a rough idea. They’ve been watching you all this time, but they may not know the in’s and out’s to your method of madness. Why does mom use bleach all the time? Wouldn’t dad’s toolbox be better off in the basement 😳😬.
And you know what’s even more interesting, your kids are actually expect this of you. While we have listed our top 7, here is a quick video from Firstcry Parenting on their 10 crucial life skills to equip your child with.
Learning to Cook, Clean and Build Healthy Habits.
Cooking is one of those skills that should be on the top of any parent’s list. At least in our home knowing the basics is something we review with our children often. While we love our children, and hope they’ll visit us for a meal when they are older, they’ll have to be able to cook at their homes as well (… this isn’t a soup kitchen 😂). While they don’t have to prepare any culinary delights, you would at least want your children to develop the basic skills, like measuring, preparing ingredients, and how to tell when food is properly cooked.
Along with that essential skill comes how to properly clean. It would seem to go without saying, after all; who wants a dirty home or to see a mess like this …
I know what your thinking… “This is going to be an up hill battle! 🙄 It doesn’t have to be, however. There are plenty of creative ways to put some ‘spring’ in your chores and cleaning. Turn on some upbeat music, but not too loudly 😂 You can even make a friendly family competition of it. Whether you form teams or it’s every ‘man’ for themselves. As long as you and your spouse stay consistent on the rules and expectations yourselves it will make getting into a routine easier. Everyone from the youngest to the eldest can participate according to their ability, so no; not even your 4 year old catches a break.
Time Management
If you asked a handful of parents, if you could teach your child one skill, what would it be? I’m willing to bet over half would say something along the lines of proper time management. It pretty much goes into every aspect of life when you consider it. You and your family have deadlines for literally almost everything. School, work, dinner, appointments, meetings, playdates … 😮💨
Yet children will dawdle, and as frustrating as it is there’s plenty of creative and fun ways to help your children develop great time. First, it’s always great if you start before their teens. You can still teach teens great time management, but starting early makes it better for them because you can introduce it to them in small blocks rather than expect it all at once when they are older. We’ll get into more on helping teens with time management a bit more later. One often overlooked, but useful tool in guiding your child to better time management are calendars, and to add a little bit of creativity to what can often be assumed as completely boring, let’s throw some spice on those calendars, shall we.
Money Management
Ah yes, money. The main theme of 2021! 😂😂 Don’t believe me check some of what’s in the headlines here and here. One of the biggest disservices we can give to our children is not ensuring they have a firm understanding of how money works, rather than how to work for money. So we thought to re-share a gem from one of our Book of the Month picks we found useful in teaching our children of how money works and how to make it work best for you.
Self Protection
One good investment I’ve always been passionate about for both myself and my family is towards better self and family protection, not just in terms of physical self defense, but also within your home and as a group. We have many meetings in our home and one of the important ones ( and my personal favorite ) are our family security meetings. This is where we all meet to discuss tactics, our daily and monthly routines, emergency planning and other topics. It further gives us an opportunity as parents to instruct our children and allow them to take part.
While you don’t have to be a grandmaster martial artist to think about the personal safety of you and your family it can even be a creative (and up to a point ) free family activity. Many Martial Arts studios offer free trial classes via zoom where COVID-19 restrictions apply for indoor activities
Self Reliance
Sometimes it can feel like our jobs as parents is never done, our children are always looking to us for guidance on one thing or another. It can feel overwhelming at times, our children are never on PCT (Parent Central Time). So in the middle of cleaning, or preparing dinner, or work (even). One of our children wants help with homework, or getting over the next level in a game, or the rules of a board game. And we naturally as parents put our teacher hats on, and give our children the guidance they are seeking – trust me they become rare moments as children get older.
How to read… engaged reading we mean.
If you’ve hung out with us for any length of time, you know that we are nuts over reading. But not just reading in general, our main concern for our family and yours is encouraging a deep engagement with what we are reading. It’s when we tap into that part of the reading process where all the magic happens.
Here’s a few useful tips for encouraging deeper engagement in your children’s reading.
- Story-times don’t always have to be read from a book, in fact you and your children can tell your own stories. If they are at the age where they can read and write, you can even write your own stories and read them together.
2. Use of puppets during story time – We frequently use puppets as a way to further engage our children in reading. It’s a fun and creative way to keep children actively engaged in the story and even help them develop stories on their own outside of reading during playtime.
Basic Survival skills.
While we tend to think of survival skills to be something one would need to know during a camping or outdoor activity, basic survival skills are actually strategies we can use virtually anywhere, and for any form of emergency the subtle skill of tying knots, for example can be used for erecting a tent in your own back yard, binding fire wood, or even securing things to a truck for transportation to another location. Other survival skills such as locating edible plant life, building and maintaining a safe outdoor fire, etc has many uses that don’t have to be restricted to camping and survival in the wild. I’ll give you another example. Tracking can be used even for locating animals that are safe to observe from a distance, such as deer and small mammals on a hike. Learning such skills in a safe and practical manner will teach children valuable skills such as fire and wildlife safety, self sufficiency, and how to respond to emergency situations at home. With anything of this nature parents should take the time to review safety standards working with tools such as folding knives and camping tools.
Hey there, Writing Elite readers, what are some of your favorite life skills taught in your family? We’d love to hear them! Leave a comment below.