There is this peculiar thing about life skills. They can’t be taught in classroom environment. They have to be part of your life and need practical demonstration. They work better when experienced before being they are adopted. Life skills are also easy to learn because they are day to day skills that we need to carry on through life; they basically teach us to face and sort out day to day life.
We have been discussing life skills that should be taught to our children early in life before they set foot in adulthood. The earlier we start the more fine tuned their senses will be. While some life skills are gender specific some are general. Let’s talk about a few more life skills that kids need to pick up early.
Make Them Understand True Meaning of Happiness: Demonstrate through action as to how joy and happiness count in life and how to attain them. Teach them early to live in the present, be in the moment and enjoy life. Teach them to find purpose in early years of their lives. The purpose could be small or big, but there should be a purpose, a goal.
Relationships: Like happiness and compassion, this skill is also about stronger inner engineering that will lead to emotional well being of the person practicing it. Teach them importance of nurturing relationships. Be social, enjoy your get together, organise them and make kids part of the scene. If you don’t nurture relations, or enjoy investing in people or value them, they will listen to your pep talk but won’t follow it. So it is important that you give them experiences instead of talking or discussing with them.
Social Skills: As much as you focus on improving child’s conversation skills, also teach her to be an alert and a good listener. Teach children healthy competition. This will automatically improve child’s interpersonal skills and behaviour. Child will learn to look at competition positively, will be pen to help friends, will not hesitate to seek help from friends, and thus make friends in the process! A very important life skill indeed!
Compassion: Teach children to empathise with friends and fellows around and ease their sufferings. Compassion is a skill that will add to the quality of your child’s character and take her a long way. In fact compassion is a quality that will make your child humane. While helping them experience compassion, teach them to love; doing things that will create happiness for everyone around.
Problem Solving: A very important life skill that he’s going to require forever. Something schools hardly have time to focus on these days with academic pressure always looming large. The lesson of positive and optimistic thinking will help kids to solve problems or get over hurdles in life.
Self Learning: Inculcate the discipline to self learn, it will make them self motivated, a key ingredient for a successful life.
Decision Making: To start with encourage your child to take small decisions, also allow them to make mistakes; get involved with kids to analyse the mistakes. It will prepare child while still young to face bigger and more serious problems later as they get through the grind of life.
Set a Good Value System: Teach kids value of discipline, value of education, value of savings, value of relationships, friends, holiday, and so on. All these he can learn from you by merely observing you in day to day life. Introduce them to a several activities to choose a hobby. Discuss real time life situations and experiences to give him clarity on consequences of procrastination; that nothing is absolute; that short cut and lie does not pay.
Practical Skills: Teach them hygiene; to fix household items, teach them to be organized with their books, clothes, sports items, maintaining vehicle & electronic gadgets in good and working condition, and learning basic cleaning around the house.
English