10 Essential Life Skills to Pass on to Your Kids (And You Should Have these Skills Yourself)

Recently a UK paper published a survey of the top 30 “basic life skills” fathers are no longer teaching their children. The list, topped off with “building a tree house” and “making a catapult,” reads more like a lament on the invasiveness of modern technology than a realistic parenting critique. I know it’s British, but “playing Pooh sticks” isn’t exactly what I’d dub a “basic life skill” in the twenty-first century.

There is, however, a point to be made about what parents aren’t teaching their children any longer. In the era of two-working-parent families with single motherhood on the rise, it isn’t any surprise that parents have learned to rely heavily on educational outlets to pass on the kind of skills children used to learn at home. Even stay-at-home mothers like me who maintain a certain level of flex-time work wind up watching their children learn their letters and numbers from Sesame Street.

Yet, even outsourced education is severely lacking when it comes to critical life skills. Younger children are being forced to consume academics at tender ages from educators who struggle to impart basic social skills. Parents of older children often complain that high school students learn none of the basic life skills they once attained in public school: sewing, financial management, basic home and auto repair. College graduates who used to be able to establish successful careers with broad-based liberal arts degrees now struggle to find work. Trade school students have a better chance of becoming independent business owners than their more elite peers.

That’s not to say that every child needs to become a master plumber, but if I were to make a list of the skills parents no longer pass down to their children I certainly wouldn’t waste my time on Pooh sticks. In fact, here are 10 “real life skills” my husband and I want to pass down to our sons.

Time Management What really matters? And why? So many kids are shuffled around to different activities that they’re on ADHD medication. I bet none of them understand the value their parents place on these things, because their parents don’t either. I want our kids to value the time they’ve been given and know how to use it wisely.

Basic Outdoor Skills An avid camper, my husband looks forward to pitching tents, hiking, and teaching our sons about nature. I’m big on the fun of compasses, pocket knives, and how to read physical maps without the assistance of a computerized voice.

How to Build, Not Just Use a Computer Yes, times have changed since my husband tinkered in the '90s, but the concept is still the same: If you want to appreciate the technology, you need to understand how it works. Our kids won’t just be mesmerized by Minecraft or YouTube.

Research Methodology

True confession: Back when I was in college, I quickly discovered that most part time jobs paid crappy wages and required long, often inconvenient, hours.

However, I did understand that almost any college, even a state university, had a subset of rich kids who would pay well to have their research papers set up for them.

So, early in the semester, while these kids were partying, I would be hitting the library, which was practically empty, and filling out a few hundred index cards with source information and interesting facts on various topics without knowing even what paper topics would be assigned.

In those days, the profs looked for good evidence of research (footnotes and bibliography) and there was ALWAYS a way to work 20 or so of my 200+ index cards into a paper on nearly ANY topic.

Plus, I knew how to organize and write almost in formula fashion.

The rich kids who called on me early would get charged a very reasonable rate of $15 or $20 per hour which would ratchet up to $40 per hour if they waited the week before the papers were due. My own papers, of course, were already done by that time. And I could clear $300 or more in the week before the papers came due.

Not bad money back in the early 1980's when tuition was $3000 or less per semester at state universities west of the Mississippi. No client of mine ever got lower than a B+ either because the profs loved my many footnotes and long bibliographies.

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