If you’re a parent, then there’s a good chance that you want to inculcate the most essential life skills in your child. You want to pass on to them, all the valuable skills and knowledge you’ve learned.
With their young age, the kind of lessons that you teach your child may impact how they navigate their surroundings later on in life. Whether it’s handling problems on their own, establishing relationships with their peers, or dealing with losses, knowing how to handle and react to these are defined by what they’ve learned when they were young. Read on to learn more.
Social Skills
As early as now, you should encourage your child to build their social skills. Some children are natural charmers and can easily get along well with anyone. But if you think your child is having difficulty with this aspect, be proactive and help them through it.
Telling your child to make friends is one thing, but it’s another thing for them to actually put themselves out there. Try instead to build this skill with them. For example, you could promote good practices, like teaching them the importance of eye-contact, allowing them to speak up for themselves, or exposing them to different types of people.
Thinking Critically
With the misinformation peddled by different platforms nowadays, it can be difficult for your child to learn how to differentiate fact from fiction. Knowing this, it’s also your responsibility to help them develop critical thinking skills.
You don’t have to do anything complicated — even small objects in your house can serve as opportunities to exercise critical thinking.
To better illustrate this, think about this situation: you drop a fork and it makes a sound. You can ask your child how this is possible. They might give an answer and it could be true or false. If it’s the latter, then you can now explain to them the science behind vibrations and how they produce sound once they interact with the environment.
Another way to go about this is by being open to your child’s inquiries and opinions. When they approach you to share something or to ask a question, indulge them. Avoid being dismissive and try to pique their interests to the best of your abilities.
When your child learns to think for themselves, they won’t be easily swayed by the decisions and opinions of others. They would also become better at making decisions that are suitable for any situation they find themselves in.
Resilience
Life is not all fun and games. Even if you haven’t explicitly told this to your child, they’re bound to experience it in one way or another — for example, when they lose a game, get low scores, or lose a friend.
To be able to bounce back from all these experiences, your child needs to have a sense of resilience. It’s the understanding that while things may not be great at the moment, they’ll definitely be better in the future once your child adopts a more hopeful and optimistic outlook. More than that, having resilience also helps build the necessary skills for them to solve problems and face challenges with a strong will.
Promoting resilience can be done in a number of ways: for one, you can teach your child how to take care of themselves when something unfortunate happens to them. This lets them know that punishing oneself is discouraged. Instead, it’s about building mental health by first addressing the social, emotional, and physical aspects.
Making Decisions
As your child grows up, they may find themselves making important decisions — be it a major change in career, starting a family, or financial matters. You won’t always be there to guide them, so as early as now you should inspire your child to build their decision-making capabilities.
Give your child freedom to define certain aspects of their life from time to time. For example, let them choose what clothes they will wear when they go out, what interests they want to pursue, or even the type of friendships they want to form.
Unless it’s about something that directly affects their health and well-being, forcing your child to do things that they don’t want may not really have a positive outcome. Instead, allow them make these decisions by themselves, but always be there to provide wisdom and guidance.
Practical Chores
Last but not the least, your child should also have an understanding of how to do basic household chores. This aids in nurturing a sense of responsibility and accountability in them, which will be important as they take on more responsibilities in the future.
Let your child take the reins in washing dishes, throwing out the trash, or even cleaning their own bedroom. They may not easily warm up to it, but they’ll definitely get there the more consistently they do these activities. The next thing you know; they might find the initiative to start doing chores on their own.
Key Takeaway
In this short and simple guide, you’ve learned some essential life skills for your child. They include social skills, household chores, critical thinking, decision-making, and the capacity to build resilience.
For parents, helping kids develop these life skills may take time. You may even find setbacks in your child along the way. However, sticking it out and not giving up is crucial. Be patient with your child and have faith that they can carry on these important skills with them as they continue to grow up.
