12 Most Essential Life Skills Your Child Should Know
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
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.
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.
●
Adds to self-confidence
●
Boosts physical fitness
●
Inculcates discipline
●
Improves eating habits
●
Develops more awareness and
fighters reflex
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
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
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:
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.
●
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
●
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.
We cannot solve our problems with the same
thinking we used when we created them.
Albert Einstein
●
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.
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
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
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