Teaching Our Children Important Life Skills

We believe it is so important to teach our children important life skills before they make their own way into the big wide world.

Something we have always been passionate about is teaching our kids to cook at home. We have been trying to teach them about how to make healthy food and I know that their school has also been teaching them this.

Food is something we all really enjoy and we feel that cooking is an important life skill. We will always supervise them in the kitchen but we believe it is important for them to learn what goes into the food we make and how it comes together to make the finished result. We often find that some recipes are in measurements we don’t use so this handy conversion calculator has been a lifesaver for this moments. The kids often love finding US recipes which need to be adapted into UK measurements so this has saved us so much time recently.

We have also been teaching them more and more about personal finance. Simple things such as doing some chores to earn a little money, saving their money to gain interest or even helping to buy a meal out and working out the tip with this fantastic tip calculator. It does use dollars but we simply pretend the dollar is a pound sign. Simple things that children can understand but that help prepare them for adulthood.

There are a variety of other life skills we have been teaching them – or finding someone else to teach them. Jack has been swimming with his school recently – he could swim a little bit before but not a lot but now he is doing really well and I am so thankful that he has learned such a valuable life skill. I am almost 32 and cannot swim and I don’t want that for my children.

Olivia is still a little too small for this but we are also trying to teach Jack about time management. He knows how to tell the time but he is a bit of a dawdler so it is important to instil some time management skills in him. We have given him some opportunities to plan journeys and tell us what time we need to leave somewhere so we get somewhere else at a certain time. It has been trial and error but we are slowly getting there.

Of course, we don’t just make them practice life skills or learn stuff constantly – they are allowed to have fun too! They love to play games – whether that is puzzle games or fun and simple games such as this Fruit Snake game that is reminiscent of the Snake game on old Nokias! Side note, I am nowhere near as good at this game as I am the old Nokia game! Jack is SO much better!

As parents, I believe teaching children important life skills is something we should all be doing. Schools will teach them a lot but there is plenty that they won’t too and experiences can help children to learn and prepare themselves for standing on their own two feet. I was taught many important life skills as a child but there are a few more I could certainly have done with such as money management!

What important life skills have you taught your children?