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11 Life Skills You Should Teach Your Kids
Life skills are valuable lessons kids will use throughout their lifetime. But most kids don’t learn how to handle real-world situations until they’re in high school. Don’t wait until your kids are teens to teach them life skills.
Get a jump start on teaching your children practical lessons. Start with decision-making and then build on each life skill lesson as your children grow.
Decision-Making Skills Good decision making for kids
Making good decisions is a life skill every child should begin learning at a young age. Begin with basic choices like chocolate versus apple, blending of colors in the choice of clothes, playing indoors, or playing outdoor depending on the weather. When kids reach elementary school age, they can begin learning about the rewards of good decisions and the consequences of bad decisions.
Walk your child through the many steps of decision-making. Help them weigh their options, evaluate the pros and cons, make a final decision and then see how things play out.
Health and Hygiene
Brushing your teeth
Your kids are never too young to begin learning about health and hygiene. In our hectic day-to-day shuffle, we’re always telling our kids to take a bath, brush their teeth, wash their hands, and change their underwear. We never tell them why, though.
Getting your children to brush their teeth Explain why health and hygiene are always going to be crucial parts of their routine. As your children begin learning about this life skill, set up a chart that allows them to check off each task as they complete it. When these healthy habits are established, you’ll be able to take away the chart and your kids will complete these tasks without you having to continually remind them.
Time Management
Every parent knows how important time management helps to keep your family on track. But it’s also important for kids to learn time management lessons when they’re young.
Teaching younger children how to measure time, stay on task, and keep to a schedule helps make your days easier. Learning this life skill also helps them become masters of time so they can do everything from get up on schedule to someday getting to work on time.
Even the youngest children can learn how to prepare a meal. We’re not talking about a five-course dinner, of course, but you can teach preschoolers how to fix a sandwich and elementary school kids to use the microwave. And from tots to teens, your kids can be your sous chefs (A sous-chef de cuisine, or simply sous-chef, (French: “under-chief of the kitchen”) is a chef who is “the second in command in a kitchen; the person ranking next after the executive chef.”) when it comes to the time for cooking.
As your children become more confident in the kitchen, they can add on other meal prep life skills like learning how to bag their own lunch, make healthy food choices, cook a simple meal with adult supervision and plan their own meals.
Money Management
We teach our kids to count. We teach our kids basic math. We can take those lessons further and turn them into life skills they can begin using right now.
Money management skills – Money management is something many adults have trouble with. Teaching your children about money, its importance, and how to manage it will help prepare them for the day they start earning a paycheck of their own.
Teach your kids effective money management so they can learn how to save, spend wisely, and make a change. It’s also important for them to understand that money used for buying all the things they need in the house isn’t free money, it was earned through work.