Articles

Browse Articles » Kids & Teens » 12 Most Essential Life Skills Your Child Should...

12 Most Essential Life Skills Your Child Should Know

by Kool Stories Micro Learning Platform

Every kid is an anomaly, every kid is a genius, every kid is special. All they need is a healthy nudge in the right direction. Children achieve vast horizons only when these masterminds are equipped with the best tools of abundant wisdom. Hence, John Locke wisely said,

“Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters”.

He considered the mind as a blank slate or “tabula rasa”; something to be decorated with learning. Let’s establish that the child is no less than Christopher Columbus himself, be the wind in his and support his voyage with these twelve important life skills:

Effortless Time management
Efficient financial management
Superior Emotional intelligence
Excellent Communication skills
Powerful Self defence skills
Proper Dining etiquettes
Effectual Cleaning and Household Chores
Strong Creative and critical thinking
Delicious and economical Cooking
Practical problem solving
Budget-friendly shopping and negotiation skills
Handling failure

Before we begin, here is an introductory peek into the legacy you are about to pass onto your future generations.

What are life skills?

Those set of skills which help you get through life are simply called life skills. They may be as ordinary as cleaning or shopping or can be long-term and impactful like money management. All those abilities that make your chores and responsibilities smoother and ‘doable’ can be clubbed together as essential life skills. Bypassing these on to your kids, you will be furnishing them with the ultimate tools to win at life. While some of these are acquired and learnt during study programs, others have to be manifested and taught.

Let’s get your child prepared for a kaleidoscope of challenges.

Powerful Self defence skills

With the dynamic world we see everyday, kids should be able to defend themselves and be ready for all situations. Although they cannot be paranoid and prepare for the worse all the time, knowing basic self defence can act as their forever protective shield.

Additionally, self defence skills:

● Adds to self-confidence

● Boosts physical fitness

● Inculcates discipline

● Improves eating habits

● Develops more awareness and fighters reflex

Therefore, enroll your child to learn self defence or teach him the fundamentals of martial arts yourself.

Effortless Time management

With all that energy and short attention span, kids are bound to while away their time in the most fruitless activities. Since it is impossible to always stand over their shoulders (unless you are one of those helicopter parents), teach your kids the value of minutes, hours and days by building best strategies for time management. This is a super important life skill to pass on because it:

● Helps in achievement of goals

● Gets more done in less time

● Sorts routine and makes more room for everything

● Avoids stress build-up

As children begin to absorb information from their early childhood years (birth to eight years), teach time management to children by:

● Developing proper routine that governs their daily activities

Delicious and economical Cooking

Home cooked meals are more healthy and less heavy on the pocket. Not to forget, cooking is one of the most creative skills for children and adults alike.

Let your kid find his way around the kitchen by:

● Moulding him into a little sous chef Introducing him to different cooking techniques and methods

● Giving them knowledge of different cuisines

● teaching them how to do basic cooking or prepare low effort meals like frozen food, sandwiches, omelette, or mac and cheese

● Conveying nutritional value of various ingredients

Cooking is the best and most engaging way to keep the kids busy. Moreover, it is a quintessential (and we cannot stress this enough) skill that makes someone self-sufficient.

Effectual Cleaning and Household Chores

Let's face it, your kids will live independently at some point in their life and manage everything all by themselves. This management involves knowing basic cleaning and doing household chores among other things.

Knowledge of all these will be helpful for your child and become more able. What more do you want as parents?

Here is how you can include your young'uns into cleaning:

Playfully count in your kids to do tasks like laundry, cleaning the bathroom, folding clothes, mopping a floor, doing the dishes.

Once they get the hang of it, slowly assign them tasks or distribute and schedule them among your children/child.

Efficient financial management

Adulthood is all about managing finances. If your kid knows the basics of money management, he is bound to make it as a successful adult and make the most of what's available.

Introduce your child to this life skill at an early age by:

● Having conversations about money

● Giving them the liberty to handle their own savings/pocket money.

Handling failure

“When we give ourselves permission to fail, we, at the same time, give ourselves permission to excel.” - Eloise Ristad

As a parent, you obviously want nothing but the best for your kid. But this shouldn't deter you from teaching them the importance of failure. Moreover, it is your primary responsibility to prepare them for a rainy day. It is these emotionally mature kids who grow upto become intellectually and socially prolific.

As adults, understand that failing is a part and parcel of life and try to normalise it. Here is how you do it:

● Don't spoon feed or overly correct your kids.

● Allow them space to discover new arenas, be willing to try new things without considering success or failure

● If they fail, teach them to extract a lesson and move past it.

Budget-friendly Shopping and negotiation skills

Shopping is a necessity but negotiating is an art. In fact, smart shopping is both a financial aid and means to become a clever consumer.

To avoid your kid from being taken to the cleaners, try this approach:

● Talk about the acceptable prices of commodities

● Discuss the basics of how to stick to a budget

● Allow them to shop for items like groceries

Excellent Communication skills

Your child has unique ideas and they will be heard only if he makes himself heard. Excellent communication skills will allow them to voice opinions, express concerns and advocate for a cause. While parents can easily give more opportunities to their children to speak up, communications skills can also be developed in these exhaustive ways.

Practical problem-solving skills

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

Albert Einstein

All through the various stages of infancy to adulthood, a person faces a spectrum of challenges and problems. These may be very trivial or highly consequential. Whatever the situation may be, you ought to equip your child with the right tools to battle them and emerge victorious. The biggest tool for this is the mind. Prepare your child for life’s hardships by:

● Using emotional coaching

● Employing creative play

● Asking open-ended questions

● Giving room to analyze and reflect on problems and options

● Breaking down problems into parts

● Finding the available and optimal solutions

● Developing a creative problem-solving approach

Strong Creative and critical thinking

Although a machine, the brain doesn’t work in a one-track way. There are many different processes and thought components that work together to reach a conclusion or arrive at a decision. Therefore, it can be said that creative, pers[pective and critical thinking works together. Although one can be more dominant than the other. It is the parent’s responsibility to make the child realize his true potential by developing his thought processes.

Although they work together, cater to develop each type of thinking separately.

Parents can promote creative and critical thinking from an early age in the following ways:

● Make a child perceive and actualize his thoughts. Facilitate him to test the feasibility of each idea.

● Furnish with him with enough space to try and explore different creative horizons

● Be welcoming of your child’s unique questions and solutions.

● Encourage him to think in different and fresher ways.

Critical thinking is a skill competent enough to beat AI in the coming future. Hence, it is an extremely necessary faculty.

Superior Emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence is a skill that makes you more aware of your emotions, by giving you more control so that you handle relationships or situations more maturely.

The importance of this quotient can be understood from the fact that it future-proof’s careers by making you more sentimentally sound. If you want to raise emotionally intelligent children, begin by:

● Validating and accepting your child’s feelings

● Developing an empathetic attitude while listening to them

● Building awareness about emotions by labeling them

● Educating them about appropriate behaviours during emotional outbursts

Proper Table étiquettes

As already mentioned, dining and culinary skills are among the top 17 skills to learn on online learning app. This essential life skill shapes a person and establishes his mannerisms for eating - an extremely fundamental and social thing to do. The best way to refine these table etiquettes is by:

● Traditionally sitting down for a family meal (at least once a day)

● Leading by example by showing fine dining manners yourself

● Not being to fanatic and pedantically correcting them while eating

● Trying new cuisines