Teaching Life Skills to Children
How Parents Can Use Everyday Tasks as Lessons in the Game of Life
Balancing the checkbook, doing laundry, paying bills. While these tasks elicit feelings of monotony in most adults, they present challenges for children and teenagers. Money management, cooking and cleaning are important life skills that children need to master before they leave home. Learning them at an early age fosters independence and helps build confidence. With these benefits in mind, parents can turn the necessary evil of chore time into teaching time.
The Benefits of Multitasking at Home
In 2007, 91 percent of the United States’ 36 million families with children under 18 had at least one employed parent, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics report Employment Characteristics of Families. The proportion of married-couple families in which both parents were employed was 62 percent.
Today’s families are busier than ever. Many parents today feel stressed about carving out adequate quality time with their children. Turning chore time into family time can take some of the pressure off parents who feel guilty about working outside the home. By performing tasks together, children learn important lessons about responsibility. Teaching the “game of life” requires parents to invest time and patience, but the dividends can be priceless.
Everyday Life Skills
In the book Sharing Family Time: Simple Ways to Make the Most of Busy Days [The Stonesong Press, 1996], social psychologist Susan K. Perry, Ph.D. suggests parents involve the entire family and start with a list of everyday skills used in running a household. “Whoever knows how to do something can teach it to someone else; this includes an older sibling teaching a younger one," Perry writes.
Life Skills Kids Can’t Live Without
Parents should teach life skills that match the age of their children and their family’s priorities. Perry suggests these examples as starting points to teach essential life skills to children:
- Teach children how to plan and follow a budget. Explain the importance of record-keeping and saving receipts. Demonstrate how to write a check, pay a bill and read a monthly bank or credit statement. Let children develop a budget with their monthly allowance.
- Teach children how to perform simple repairs, such as changing a light bulb or installing a faucet washer. Show them the location of the fuse box and the main shutdown switches for water and gas.
- Teach kids how to prepare simple – yet nutritious – meals. Cracking, scrambling, slicing and dicing require a certain know-how.
- Teach them how to read a map, a catalog, a phone book and a utility bill. Let your child navigate the next road trip.
- Show children how to sort, wash, dry, iron and fold laundry. Teach basic housekeeping skills. Even preschoolers can dust!
- Teach children basic sewing skills. Knowing how to sew buttons and hems will come in handy throughout their lives.
- Pack a suitcase. Let children practice with their own travel bag so they can pack themselves when it’s time for the next vacation.
- Perform family fire, tornado and earthquake drills. Teach children how to use the telephone during an emergency. Put children in charge of drills periodically to test their readiness.
- Take a basic first aid class together. Younger children can learn the Heimlich maneuver, while older children can learn CPR.
Teaching Kids Reality
While a lot of focus is placed on the three traditional R’s of learning, Perry writes, families should place more emphasis on the fourth R – reality. All parents – no matter how busy they are – can multitask by turning mundane chores into valuable lessons while spending time with their children.
Teenager Makes French Toast
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