10 Essential Life Skills to Teach Your Children

Babyment

10 Essential Life Skills to teach your children

1. Cooking. It is often considerably cheaper for us to cook our own meals rather than eat outside. With inflation on the rise, it would be advisable for children to learn how to cook so that they will have the option of preparing cheaper meals for themselves in the future when they are short of money. Also, it is easier for us to include healthy ingredients that we like to eat when preparing our own meals.

2. First Aid: It is not realistic to expect that our children will be accompanied by adults at all times. Thus, it is important that we teach them some basic first aid skills so that they are able to patch themselves up after a nasty fall or accident. This could be accomplished by introducing your children to a first aid kit and explaining how to use the kit’s components for treating scratches and other mild injuries.

3. Sports: It’s much easier to get your children to lead an active lifestyle and consistently exercise when they find a sport that they like to play. We could encourage them to start exploring the different type of sports by attempting to engage in it alongside them. Family friendly sports include badminton, tennis and bowling et cetera, when we play sports with our children, it can strengthen the bond between parent and child as well.

4. Doing the laundry: Unfortunately, we are too reliant on utilizing washers and dryers to take care of our laundry in this modern day and age. However, sometimes access to this equipment may not always be possible and it would be best if we teach our children how to wash and dry laundry the old-fashioned way. This has the added benefit of them helping to relieve their parents of chore of having to do the laundry all by themselves.

5. Good Manners: Having good manners is a life skill that stays with you throughout your lifetime. Knowing good manners will benefit an individual in so many different ways. A child with good manners could impress or please his teachers and peers. An adult with good manners could impress his/her date easily or leave a great impression on other individuals during interviews or other social interactions.

6. Self Defence skills: Kids can be very cruel, as they are not old enough to understand the consequences of their actions. Thus, bullies are rather common in primary and secondary schools. Teaching self-defense skills to your children can build their self-confidence, enabling them to stand up for themselves even without resorting to violence. If the situation escalates, your child will then be able to hold or even fight off the bully. Bear in mind that parents should emphasize on the ‘defense’ aspect as they do not want their own children to transform into the bullies.

7. Time Management: Force your children to be independent and manage their own time by refusing to act as their alarm clocks. Encourage them into using alarm clocks or their phones to set timers for their actions. For instance, get your children to plan different activities throughout the day and schedule them in a form of a timetable. Then utilize the alarm clocks as reminders for them to start on a new activity instead of spending too much time on one.

8. Financial savvy: Apart from education, nothing can prepare your children for adulthood better than having adequate knowledge about managing money. Providing your children with a fixed allowance and advice on how to spend them could teach them the value of delayed gratification, where they save their money for a certain end reward while cutting their expenditure on lesser but immediate rewards.

9. Swimming: Swimming can be a great hobby for your children to keep in shape. Also, knowing how to swim is a pre-requisite if your children desire to join water sports in the future. Henceforth, learning how to swim is important for ensuring the safety of your child when they spend time at the beach, swimming pools or any other water bodies. Enrolling your child when they are at least eighteen month olds for swimming lessons under certified swimming instructors would be ideal.

10. Navigation: Often, a GPS can be unreliable as we may misunderstand the GPS’ electronic voice directions or they may send us on a longer and more inconvenient route. Moreover, teaching your children how to use maps could potentially benefit them when their phones run out of battery and that they can no longer rely on using a GPS to navigate. Start small by asking them to navigate from their schools to your house using a map. This could also be beneficial when you are unable to drive them home and they have to find their own way back home.