I found this article with some of my self reliance items. I do not remember where I got it nor do I take credit for writing it.
Skills Every
Self-Reliant Child Needs to Know
By Carolyn Nicolaysen
By Carolyn Nicolaysen
On a recent television
show the host was talking to people about the things on their “bucket lists” –
in other words, the kind of things they wanted to do before they “kicked the
bucket”. A popular film and several books on this theme have made the rounds,
and others touting 1000 places to see, 100 things to do, and so on. This got me
thinking about the bucket list a parent or grandparent might have for their
children and grandchildren. What skills and knowledge need to be passed on to
the next generation, before we – “pass on”.
Several years ago I was teaching a Beehive class in Young Women with a group of promising 12 and 13 year-old girls. I really can't recall the topic of the lesson but I do remember the girls’ reaction so well. At one point one of the girls raised her hand and said "But Sister Nicolaysen we are never going to be good grandmas like our grandmothers. We don't know how to do anything. We don’t know how to sew or bake bread or can vegetables or grow a garden like our grandmothers."
As we continued to talk, it became clear that these girls were genuinely concerned that they might grow up and not know some of the hands-on things their mothers and grandmothers took for granted. They wanted to do things more meaningful than craft projects. So as a result, we had some activities to teach these skills. These girls learned to cook, make jam, sew and knit.
My boys, on the other hand, learned many of the skills they needed in Boy Scouting - everything from basic knots and map reading, to helping with a cattle roundup. If some of these skills seem irrelevant to them today, they helped provide the kind of self-confidence that would allow them to become self-reliant adults.
But not every child has equal opportunity to learn the practical skills necessary for self-reliant living as adults. What might be overlooked, unless we add some key abilities to our bucket list of skills we will teach them?
Ten Skills Every Child Can Learn, and Every Adult Should Know
1) Making family meals. There is a big difference in the quality of home cooking, family-to-family. Even if your skills are limited, children and teens can be taught to do a few things very well, such as:
- Make a healthy breakfast for the family.
- Pack a healthy lunch without expensive and unhealthy pre-packaged snack foods.
- Cook a well-balanced and delicious dinner.
Decide what your family’s strengths and weaknesses are in the kitchen, and build on your strengths so that your kids have the confidence to say “nobody makes ______ better than our family”. Make it tradition that everybody in your family knows the “__________ family recipe”, or the proper way to make an omelet. Have fun with it.
2) Baking. Everybody should know how to bake something, even if only cookies or brownies from a mix. Try various kinds of bread, dinner rolls, pies, and perhaps even making your own pastries. It’s not as hard as you think. Ovens are for more than frozen pizza, speaking of which, homemade pizza is really yummy and very easy to make.
Life skills are no longer being taught in our schools, which is where many of us learned them. We took home economics and shop classes and then went home excited to practice what we had learned. Not only did this classroom education spur our creativity and imagination but it brought us closer to our parents and grandparents as they helped us hone our new found skills. I spent many hours baking with my grandfather. His father owned a bakery as he was growing up in Brooklyn and he loved to do the baking for Christmas and all the other important family celebrations. Our family still bakes his cookies every Christmas.
3) Teens Can Do Laundry. : Teach your children and grandchildren to do the laundry. Do they know how to use the washer and dryer? Do they understand how to separate clothing into lights and darks? Do they know how to treat a stain? Do they know how to hang clothing on a clothesline to dry when a dryer is not available or the power is out? Could they wash their clothes by hand if the need arose? I remember a time when we were first married that I did not have the money to dry our clothes at the laundromat, and brought them home and hung them around the apartment to dry. We all have different circumstances and budgets, but everyone has to deal with laundry, and every member of the family can share in the responsibility.
4) We All Have Chores, and We Can All Do Them. What a shame it would be to become an adult without having shared in household work and responsibilities… yet it appears that many in this world do exactly that. Every member of the family can share in age-appropriate responsibilities for cleaning, maintaining, organizing, cooking, laundering, trash and recycling, and caring for the outside areas of the home. Make sure everyone has a responsibility, and knows that others are relying on them to do it:
- Know your job.
- Do your job (without being asked and when it needs to be done).
- Report when the job is done.
5) Grow Something for Your Menu. Everyone can have a garden, whether large or small. No matter the amount of land, or lack of it, there is always a way to teach this skill. Nothing tastes better than a strawberry or tomato that you pick and eat right out of your own garden. Let every young member of the family be responsible for something in your garden, even if it is just a potted tomato plant. There may come a time, and prophets have told us there will come a time, when we will need to provide food for our families.
6) Basic Sewing Skills. This is not just a skill we should be teaching to our daughters. Several years ago our college age son decided it might be a good idea to know how to sew. He had been looking for a pair of shorts that were long enough, but couldn’t find what he liked, so he made a pair of summer shorts. When I did my student teaching I had a sewing class that was made up entirely of boys. This was in Iowa where the schools closed for the first day of hunting season, so you may be surprised that I had 30 boys enrolled in a sewing class. Not so surprising, was that we made bright orange hunting vests for our class project!
It is no longer cheaper to make clothing than to purchase it. However, in many cases it is still much cheaper to make curtains and slip covers than to purchase them. Blankets are cheaper to purchase than to make, but a quilt is still a project that will be valued for generations. Old blankets will be retired without ceremony. The real question is: are we really self reliant if we don't know how to make a pair of shorts or a quilt? Could we take old shirts or old blankets with holes and create something to keep us warm and protected, or even make them as a service for someone else? Could your missionary repair a seam that has come apart, or sew on a button?
7) Basic Car Maintenance. If a teenager is old enough to drive, they are old enough to know that a car will not run without gas or oil. An automobile, next to your house itself, is usually the family’s second most valuable asset. It is surprising then, that so little time is spent teaching young members of the family how to respect and care for this valuable asset.
One day our college age daughter was with a group of friends and when they returned at the car to drive back from their outing, the car would not start. The guys spent several minutes trying to figure out the problem, but had no special insight. Since our daughter had taken our retired station wagon to school in Utah, she was familiar with a number of things that could be done to keep a clunker running, and suggested a fix to the problem that actually worked. She had learned about loose battery connections, because her dad knew this could and probably would happen someday with her car, and had taught her what to do. She solved the problem on her roommate’s car avoiding lost time and the cost of a tow, all to the amazement of the boys in the group. Teach your children to change a tire, add oil, check the tire pressure, add antifreeze, and add washer fluid.
8) How to Shut Down the Utilities. In many emergency situations, it may be necessary to immediately shut off one or all of the utilities, such as: In an earthquake, what would you shut off first? If there was a broken water pipe due to an ice storm, where would you shut off the water supply to your home, and what tools if any would be needed? What are some reasons to shut off the electric supply to your home?
Teach your children how to turn off the water - both the line into the house and the connections under sinks and toilets. Teach them how to turn off the electricity and gas coming into your home. Emergencies may not always occur when we are at home to take control. If there should be a broken pipe and your child called you on your cell, you could you simply tell them to turn off the water. Would they know what to do?
A few years ago there were rolling blackouts in California and many other states. These often turned out to be rolling brown outs, which meant the electricity does not immediately fail - but that small amounts of current came into our homes, then everything was fine for a while followed by the lights dimming again.. This ruined many appliances and computers. If you noticed this happening and called home, would your children know where to throw the master circuit breaker to protect the equipment and appliances in your home?
Check with your utilities for the best advice on when, where, and why to shut off the power, gas or water at your home.
9) Tools and Their Uses. Remember “Tim-the-Tool-Man Taylor”? So many adults these days have no clue how to use tools to do basic fixes around the home. Children and teens can be involved in learning and using tools for many tasks around the house. Don’t just fix things, use those household jobs as a schoolroom to teach the younger set which tools to use for which jobs. Even if your own skills are rusty or limited, there are many things you can teach that will stick with them for life. Remember, to be an expert, you only have to know more than your student.
To illustrate, our son-in-law was a first year associate at a nationally renowned, Big City Law Firm. The firm decided it would be good community relations to send out a crew of these first year associate attorneys to help at a Habitat for Humanity. Unfortunately, very few in this legal squad knew much about tools or building homes.
A short while after arriving at the project, there was some sheetrock (wall board) being installed by his fellow volunteers, and as he entered one of the rooms, several of his associates were preparing to cut some sheetrock by carefully measuring and marking the cut line on a piece of sheetrock using a chalk line. He was stunned to see an associate on each end of the chalk line holding down the ends of the line, while a third member of the team began tracing the chalk line with a pencil. He couldn’t help himself from laughing, as he went over and snapped the chalk line, leaving a perfect blue line where the other had been tracing it with a pencil. Their shock and embarrassment was priceless as their ignorance about chalk lines was instantly exposed - and this quickly became one of our favorite anecdotes.
10) Budgeting. This may seem a nasty word to many but as we have experienced the world wide economic crisis of the past few years it becomes more evident just how important this skill really is. We need to teach our children from a very early age the importance and power of money. They should have the opportunity to work and earn money of their own. Our two year old grand daughter loves to vacuum. Children should then be guided as they are taught to set aside 10% for tithing, some for savings and some for discretionary spending. After counsel from you they should be allowed to decide how they want to spend their discretionary funds and allowed to spend them unwisely if they choose to do so. This is the only way they will learn the skill of distinguishing between wants and needs.
There are many more skills we should have on our bucket list, but this is a good place to start. Take the time in Family Home Evening and during everyday events to teach these skills to the next generation. As you teach, you will find your relationships with children and grandchildren will grow as they gain confidence that you have the faith in them to be able to handle life's challenges. During the next several months we will add to our bucket list together.
Self reliance is an outlook and lifestyle we seek to teach our children from the time they are born. They will not learn it from the world. We cannot assume they will understand how to handle life's challenges from observing how many of the adults in our communities behave. I love watching young parents who take time with their children. When they work on a project or fix a broken lawnmower, their children are right there looking over their shoulders and helping. There are always opportunities to teach a valuable skill, and young people who are eager to learn, if we take the time to include them.
Several years ago I was teaching a Beehive class in Young Women with a group of promising 12 and 13 year-old girls. I really can't recall the topic of the lesson but I do remember the girls’ reaction so well. At one point one of the girls raised her hand and said "But Sister Nicolaysen we are never going to be good grandmas like our grandmothers. We don't know how to do anything. We don’t know how to sew or bake bread or can vegetables or grow a garden like our grandmothers."
As we continued to talk, it became clear that these girls were genuinely concerned that they might grow up and not know some of the hands-on things their mothers and grandmothers took for granted. They wanted to do things more meaningful than craft projects. So as a result, we had some activities to teach these skills. These girls learned to cook, make jam, sew and knit.
My boys, on the other hand, learned many of the skills they needed in Boy Scouting - everything from basic knots and map reading, to helping with a cattle roundup. If some of these skills seem irrelevant to them today, they helped provide the kind of self-confidence that would allow them to become self-reliant adults.
But not every child has equal opportunity to learn the practical skills necessary for self-reliant living as adults. What might be overlooked, unless we add some key abilities to our bucket list of skills we will teach them?
Ten Skills Every Child Can Learn, and Every Adult Should Know
1) Making family meals. There is a big difference in the quality of home cooking, family-to-family. Even if your skills are limited, children and teens can be taught to do a few things very well, such as:
- Make a healthy breakfast for the family.
- Pack a healthy lunch without expensive and unhealthy pre-packaged snack foods.
- Cook a well-balanced and delicious dinner.
Decide what your family’s strengths and weaknesses are in the kitchen, and build on your strengths so that your kids have the confidence to say “nobody makes ______ better than our family”. Make it tradition that everybody in your family knows the “__________ family recipe”, or the proper way to make an omelet. Have fun with it.
2) Baking. Everybody should know how to bake something, even if only cookies or brownies from a mix. Try various kinds of bread, dinner rolls, pies, and perhaps even making your own pastries. It’s not as hard as you think. Ovens are for more than frozen pizza, speaking of which, homemade pizza is really yummy and very easy to make.
Life skills are no longer being taught in our schools, which is where many of us learned them. We took home economics and shop classes and then went home excited to practice what we had learned. Not only did this classroom education spur our creativity and imagination but it brought us closer to our parents and grandparents as they helped us hone our new found skills. I spent many hours baking with my grandfather. His father owned a bakery as he was growing up in Brooklyn and he loved to do the baking for Christmas and all the other important family celebrations. Our family still bakes his cookies every Christmas.
3) Teens Can Do Laundry. : Teach your children and grandchildren to do the laundry. Do they know how to use the washer and dryer? Do they understand how to separate clothing into lights and darks? Do they know how to treat a stain? Do they know how to hang clothing on a clothesline to dry when a dryer is not available or the power is out? Could they wash their clothes by hand if the need arose? I remember a time when we were first married that I did not have the money to dry our clothes at the laundromat, and brought them home and hung them around the apartment to dry. We all have different circumstances and budgets, but everyone has to deal with laundry, and every member of the family can share in the responsibility.
4) We All Have Chores, and We Can All Do Them. What a shame it would be to become an adult without having shared in household work and responsibilities… yet it appears that many in this world do exactly that. Every member of the family can share in age-appropriate responsibilities for cleaning, maintaining, organizing, cooking, laundering, trash and recycling, and caring for the outside areas of the home. Make sure everyone has a responsibility, and knows that others are relying on them to do it:
- Know your job.
- Do your job (without being asked and when it needs to be done).
- Report when the job is done.
5) Grow Something for Your Menu. Everyone can have a garden, whether large or small. No matter the amount of land, or lack of it, there is always a way to teach this skill. Nothing tastes better than a strawberry or tomato that you pick and eat right out of your own garden. Let every young member of the family be responsible for something in your garden, even if it is just a potted tomato plant. There may come a time, and prophets have told us there will come a time, when we will need to provide food for our families.
6) Basic Sewing Skills. This is not just a skill we should be teaching to our daughters. Several years ago our college age son decided it might be a good idea to know how to sew. He had been looking for a pair of shorts that were long enough, but couldn’t find what he liked, so he made a pair of summer shorts. When I did my student teaching I had a sewing class that was made up entirely of boys. This was in Iowa where the schools closed for the first day of hunting season, so you may be surprised that I had 30 boys enrolled in a sewing class. Not so surprising, was that we made bright orange hunting vests for our class project!
It is no longer cheaper to make clothing than to purchase it. However, in many cases it is still much cheaper to make curtains and slip covers than to purchase them. Blankets are cheaper to purchase than to make, but a quilt is still a project that will be valued for generations. Old blankets will be retired without ceremony. The real question is: are we really self reliant if we don't know how to make a pair of shorts or a quilt? Could we take old shirts or old blankets with holes and create something to keep us warm and protected, or even make them as a service for someone else? Could your missionary repair a seam that has come apart, or sew on a button?
7) Basic Car Maintenance. If a teenager is old enough to drive, they are old enough to know that a car will not run without gas or oil. An automobile, next to your house itself, is usually the family’s second most valuable asset. It is surprising then, that so little time is spent teaching young members of the family how to respect and care for this valuable asset.
One day our college age daughter was with a group of friends and when they returned at the car to drive back from their outing, the car would not start. The guys spent several minutes trying to figure out the problem, but had no special insight. Since our daughter had taken our retired station wagon to school in Utah, she was familiar with a number of things that could be done to keep a clunker running, and suggested a fix to the problem that actually worked. She had learned about loose battery connections, because her dad knew this could and probably would happen someday with her car, and had taught her what to do. She solved the problem on her roommate’s car avoiding lost time and the cost of a tow, all to the amazement of the boys in the group. Teach your children to change a tire, add oil, check the tire pressure, add antifreeze, and add washer fluid.
8) How to Shut Down the Utilities. In many emergency situations, it may be necessary to immediately shut off one or all of the utilities, such as: In an earthquake, what would you shut off first? If there was a broken water pipe due to an ice storm, where would you shut off the water supply to your home, and what tools if any would be needed? What are some reasons to shut off the electric supply to your home?
Teach your children how to turn off the water - both the line into the house and the connections under sinks and toilets. Teach them how to turn off the electricity and gas coming into your home. Emergencies may not always occur when we are at home to take control. If there should be a broken pipe and your child called you on your cell, you could you simply tell them to turn off the water. Would they know what to do?
A few years ago there were rolling blackouts in California and many other states. These often turned out to be rolling brown outs, which meant the electricity does not immediately fail - but that small amounts of current came into our homes, then everything was fine for a while followed by the lights dimming again.. This ruined many appliances and computers. If you noticed this happening and called home, would your children know where to throw the master circuit breaker to protect the equipment and appliances in your home?
Check with your utilities for the best advice on when, where, and why to shut off the power, gas or water at your home.
9) Tools and Their Uses. Remember “Tim-the-Tool-Man Taylor”? So many adults these days have no clue how to use tools to do basic fixes around the home. Children and teens can be involved in learning and using tools for many tasks around the house. Don’t just fix things, use those household jobs as a schoolroom to teach the younger set which tools to use for which jobs. Even if your own skills are rusty or limited, there are many things you can teach that will stick with them for life. Remember, to be an expert, you only have to know more than your student.
To illustrate, our son-in-law was a first year associate at a nationally renowned, Big City Law Firm. The firm decided it would be good community relations to send out a crew of these first year associate attorneys to help at a Habitat for Humanity. Unfortunately, very few in this legal squad knew much about tools or building homes.
A short while after arriving at the project, there was some sheetrock (wall board) being installed by his fellow volunteers, and as he entered one of the rooms, several of his associates were preparing to cut some sheetrock by carefully measuring and marking the cut line on a piece of sheetrock using a chalk line. He was stunned to see an associate on each end of the chalk line holding down the ends of the line, while a third member of the team began tracing the chalk line with a pencil. He couldn’t help himself from laughing, as he went over and snapped the chalk line, leaving a perfect blue line where the other had been tracing it with a pencil. Their shock and embarrassment was priceless as their ignorance about chalk lines was instantly exposed - and this quickly became one of our favorite anecdotes.
10) Budgeting. This may seem a nasty word to many but as we have experienced the world wide economic crisis of the past few years it becomes more evident just how important this skill really is. We need to teach our children from a very early age the importance and power of money. They should have the opportunity to work and earn money of their own. Our two year old grand daughter loves to vacuum. Children should then be guided as they are taught to set aside 10% for tithing, some for savings and some for discretionary spending. After counsel from you they should be allowed to decide how they want to spend their discretionary funds and allowed to spend them unwisely if they choose to do so. This is the only way they will learn the skill of distinguishing between wants and needs.
There are many more skills we should have on our bucket list, but this is a good place to start. Take the time in Family Home Evening and during everyday events to teach these skills to the next generation. As you teach, you will find your relationships with children and grandchildren will grow as they gain confidence that you have the faith in them to be able to handle life's challenges. During the next several months we will add to our bucket list together.
Self reliance is an outlook and lifestyle we seek to teach our children from the time they are born. They will not learn it from the world. We cannot assume they will understand how to handle life's challenges from observing how many of the adults in our communities behave. I love watching young parents who take time with their children. When they work on a project or fix a broken lawnmower, their children are right there looking over their shoulders and helping. There are always opportunities to teach a valuable skill, and young people who are eager to learn, if we take the time to include them.
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