Even though there are many important lessons to take away from all sorts of situations, there are 4 critical life skills you need to teach your children, before they can be contributing members to society.

Critical Life Skills You Need to Teach Your Kids

1. HOW TO EAT

Note I said eat. Admittedly being able to cook is a desirable skill, but it means nothing if you don’t know how to eat. You can cook the finest veal cutlets in the world, or make the meanest dijon mustard in the country, but if you don’t know how to maintain a balanced diet, before long scurvy and gout will be knocking at your door. How to eat a balanced meal, provide your body with adequate nutrition, and little things like moderation and portion control and portion sizes are pretty much all you need to know to satisfy the food part in the hierarchy of needs.

2. HOW TO PAY FOR STUFF

This is not an intuitive skill. My first venture in happy adult land with a utility bill to pay left me baffled and flummoxed. Bank account? Yeppers. Money in said account? You bet. What on earth to do with the check? Not a clue. I simply put a check in the mail and hoped for the best. Boy, did I ever feel like an idiot when it was sent back with a note that said, very politely, “Sign it dummy.”

3. HOW TO GET ALONG

And I don’t mean this is where we teach our children to give up their favourite possessions to the first playmate who asks. I mean real ways to get along with other people. How to compromise. How to speak nicely, and directly.  You know, that whole do unto others bit, and you catch more flies with honey cliche. Laugh if you will, but those sayings have been around FOR FREAKING EVER for a reason.

4.WHAT STUFF COSTS

While knowing the value of a dollar is for sure super important for all of us to figure out at some age, that sometimes takes full adulthood to absorb. Knowing how much stuff costs though, can save a ton of confusion and delay right off the blocks. For example, post secondary education is in the tens of thousands of dollars range. Vehicles off the lot can be in the tens of thousands of dollars to the and WAY UP. Houses are typically in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range.  So while it may take a full summer working for minimum wage to figure out you won’t afford a mansion on your own by fall, you should know what to aim for.

Once your children have these essential life skills nailed down they will be ready to deal with and cope with whatever life has to throw at them.

Knowing how to eat, and what things cost as well as how to order what they want from the deli and how to pay for it will prepare them for any situation they will face in the future, and everything else they learn along the way, is just gravy.

Well, I wanted so badly to show off my rockin’ bell system that I actually ended up making “bong” sounds to try and get my kids to do their stuff. Of course it didn’t work. Instead, it was more like I just stood up in the front of the room like a crazy moron going, “Bong! Bong!” over and over again while my students just stared. They were used to me doing random weird things, because I’m ME for crying out loud, but they were not cool with my “bonging.”

Thank goodness the principal offered me a redo.

There was no way I was letting that little bell incident happen again, so I went on the search for something I could wear on my snazzy teacher lanyard that would accomplish the same thing as the bell did.

I searched and searched… then, when I was at the pet store–I found a dog clicker for 99 cents! It even had a keychain attachment and everything! So, what did I do?

After covering up the PetSmart logo with a snazzy sticker, I trained 22 five-year-olds to accomplish small tasks with a dog clicker.

Heck yeah, that’s what I did.

**For those of you wondering, I kicked that second evaluation’s booty.