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.

Well. The posted PJMedia article is quite practical and all, but about as interesting and sterile as a cardboard box with a jigsaw puzzle inside of it at Christmas.

But you know the difference between the posted article and the article it referenced at Fathers are no longer teaching their children basic life skills like making a catapult, repairing a bike puncture and skimming a stone.

Here is the list:

Contrasted with:

Time Management
Basic parenting, not something to "pass down to kids".

Basic Outdoor Skills
Not everyone needs to know how to build a computer.

How to Build, Not Just Use a Computer
Not everyone needs to know how to build a computer. And they sure don't need lessons on how to use them.

Home Repair and Maintenance
If you learn how to build a tree house, you learn this stuff. But you also have a fort, and can have fun. Stripping wallpaper or paint isn't fun.

Auto Repair and Maintenance
Maintenance is fine, oil change, etc. Not everyone can or needs to know how to repair a car.

Financial Management
This would be basic parenting, not things to pass down.

Basic Medical Knowledge
Yeah. We used to get this in the Boy Scouts before they became homosexualized.

Research Methodology
Research Methodology as something to "pass down to kids? Give me a break.

Critical Thinking Skills
Again, isn't this just basic parenting?

Reverence for God
This would be a good one.

The difference is that this utilitarian list has absolutely zero, nada, zilch about using your imagination. Good God, why don't we skip Kindergarten, Grade School, Middle School, and High School and send them directly to college to get an MBA?

Why don't we let kids go out in a field at night and look at stars, catch tadpoles, and so on.

What is it where kids have to be little adults and not kids? It seems like every kid has to have their time filled with organized activities. I hate seeing it. I wouldn't want to grow up today as a kid. As a boy, I would likely be a prisoner of video games...I am just glad they didn't have them, because I sure as hell would have been.

I taught all of my kids almost everything on that list. All of my boys were Eagle Scouts, and all of my girls reached a comparable level of knowledge of the Scouting skills. We never used jumpers as goalposts, and I didn’t even know what “conkers” meant, but otherwise we had a clean sweep of those skills and many others.

All of my kids can put ten out of ten shots in the black of a standard target at the appropriate distance, with rifle and with pistol. All of them are pure conservatives who can explain why conservatism is the moral choice. All of them are productive, employed, and professionally successful. All of them are planning families, with multiple children - perhaps the greatest hope for America as decent people raise their kids while leftists murder their unborn.

Not only critical thinking, but common sense as well. The same teenagers who would lecture us on gun control as pawns of the far left are also the idiots sticking condoms in their noses and holding laundry detergent pods in their mouths. Common sense would tell you that defacing your body with multiple piercings and gaudy tattoos and dying your hair fluorescent colors is not cool, makes you look like an idiot and unlikely to get hired in any professional job regardless of how smart you are. Ditto for wearing jeans with holes ripped in them or your pants hanging down on your thighs

If your credit ‘shaky’ and you NEED 1500 do NOT ask for 1500...you will normally get (maybe) 1000 and in essence not much better off than you were especially if the 1500 is a ‘demand NOW’ type deal.

So, If you need 1500 ask for 1987.58.
You will probably get dropped back to 1500 AND the lender will think you really ‘did your homework’ as the 87.58 will ‘catch his eye’.

(Old estimator ‘trick’.....NEVER give even quote (EVERYONE does that), and sort of explain that you got it down as low as you possibly could in your quest to ‘help’ him/her...)

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