Are Your Kids Learning These Important Life Skills?

Generally speaking, everybody’s children learn basic personal care. They learn to dress themselves, to tie their shoes, to brush their teeth and their hair. And most people prioritize academics. But there are two other areas that are very important. One is character/biblical values/godliness. That’s the most important thing, but it’s a subject for another post. The other is life skills.

By life skills, I mean things that are beyond the obvious putting on clothes, etc., but are practical things we all need to know how to do. Did you learn to balance a checkbook or manage a budget? How to clean? (Not only how to actually wash a thing, but how to manage the overall cleaning project.) What about how to declutter/tidy up? We have a tendency to just assume “everyone knows” how to do these things and never actively teach them, but they’re learned skills!

Let’s talk about what a few of those life skills might be.

Spiritual Disciplines

Let’s start from the top, shall we? Spiritual disciplines are some of the most important life skills, but we forget they’re skills. We know people have to learn things like self-control, but forget they also need to learn things like how to pray. (Even the twelve Apostles had to ask for help learning to pray!)

We gathered two resources from the 2016 Ultimate Homemaking Bundle [Click here if you want to be sure you don’t miss the next one] that are specifically relevant for this and specifically for children. Prayer Practice for Kids presents a series of challenges to get children praying in a variety of ways for a variety of things. The intent is to stretch their comfort zones and avoid the rut of rattling off the same few requests in the same order every time. (Are my kids the only ones who do that?) Also, by the way, I wrote this one.

Developing a Quiet Time uses a step-by-step process to slowly introduce a structured quiet time. It starts small and simple and builds, adding in pieces until the full habit is in place.

Tidying/Cleaning

When I read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, one of the things that jumped out at me was the author’s comment about how people aren’t generally taught to tidy up. She’s right. Tidying/decluttering is just assumed to innately happen or something.

If you’re looking for resources about tidying, decluttering, or organizing specifically for children, I know of a couple options. For organization, Organizing from the Inside Out for Teens is a good choice. For basic tidying, we like the Bedroom Cleaning for Kids Clean ‘n Flip by the folks at Times Tales. (My only “beef” with it is that it’s not “cleaning”; it’s “tidying,” and I believe one important life skill is learning the difference between the two. I wish they’d titled this Bedroom Tidying for Kids.)

Teaching Kids to Clean is an excellent resource for teaching children how to clean. By “Nony” (Dana White) of A Slob Comes Clean (a fantastic site for us not-naturally-organized folks!), this gets into the how-to’s of things like how to clean a toilet, how to wash laundry, how to mop, etc. It also includes some really helpful, simple safety rules like not standing on things that rock, fold, or roll!

Cooking

Everybody has to eat. It’s a lot easier to eat nutritiously and inexpensively if you know how to cook. Katie from Kitchen Stewardship has a whole e-course for kids, to teach them how to cook, and (even better!) it’s real, wholesome food, not the junky white flour stuff we usually find in kids’ cookbooks. Kids Cook Real Food looks great, and I’m looking forward to enrollment opening up again so my kids can take it. (I missed the last round; oops!) I think it will open up again in a month or so.

Finances

The Kids Responsibility and Money Management Kit is a printable packet of handy tools for teaching (what else?) responsibility and money management. It’s designed to be used with chores and finances together, as you’ll see when you open up the PDF, but you can certainly use them separately or only choose one or the other. There are labels for spend/share/save jars, a deposit/withdrawal sheet similar to a checkbook register, a chart for tracking saving toward a goal, etc. These are helpful tools for introducing basic money management concepts.

Older children will probably need to add onto this with knowledge of filling in a “real” register, how to write a check, etc., but this is a good introduction.