Life Skill Activities to Incorporate into Your Child’s Daily Routine
Decision-Making Skills:
Making good decisions is a life skill every child should begin learning at a young age. Begin with basic choices like chocolate versus vanilla ice cream, blue socks or white socks, playing trains or playing cars. When kids reach elementary school age, they can begin learning about the rewards of good decisions and the consequences of bad decisions.
Using the Web Wisely:
With kids spending more time on screens than ever before, it's essential to reinforce a few rules to help them safely navigate the digital world, says Joscelyn Ramos Campbell, a mom of four in Clermont, Florida, who blogs at Mami of Multiples. So as soon as your child can use technology unsupervised, go over these best practices:
- Help your child choose a password that's hard to guess and tell them to never share it with anyone except you.
- Ensure your child only chats with people they know in real life and doesn't give out personal information such as their birthday, home address, or phone number.
- Remind your child to be kind; anything they send or say virtually is there forever.
- Have your child get permission or ask for help from you before downloading something or clicking a pop-up.
- Most importantly, let your kid know they can come to you with any issue. "This is a conversation you will have again and again as your children get older," says Ramos Campbell.
How to manage time:
You’re probably wondering how. Well, you can do this by getting your kid to claim responsibility for their own time.
Do this by getting them an alarm clock that they can use to wake up on time for school, instead of you waking them up.
Get them a planner to use to track their school work and other extra-curricular work and to keep track of what needs to be done by when.
When they do this, they will automatically begin to allow specific amounts of time for play and for work.
Involve them in simple cooking:
Children can cook, too! Don’t you agree?
And you can start with simple things! Teach your child how to make their own peanut butter and jam sandwiches, teach them how to butter a slice of bread, and how to make a salad.
Have them tear up greens, squeeze lemons, and put chopped vegetables together to make a salad.
You can also get them to help you with baking, with handing you ingredients while you cook or with keeping the kitchen table clean while you’re preparing a meal.
How to interact with people:
We’ve all taught children about stranger danger but this doesn’t make much logical sense considering every person we’re close to as adults was a stranger to us at some point.
Instead, teach your children to do exactly what adults do. Teach them to differentiate between good strangers and bad strangers. Teach them how to interact with good strangers.
Teach them how to make friends, how to be friendly to good adults, and just how they should go about interacting with these people.
If you think about it, a task that we do every single day is to be engaged in
interaction with people. If we don’t teach children this at a young age, they may not develop positive social skills.
Cleaning and other household chores:
Now I know what you’re thinking. Getting kids to get involved in cleaning activities is really hard! We agree. But we assure you that your effort will be well worth it!
Start small by just asking them to keep their room clean, make their bed, and make sure everything they own is in its right place. You can then ask them to clean the dishes that they use to eat after eating as well.
You can ask them to dust the tables one day and ask them to take the trash out on another; you can also ask them to set the table in whichever way they think looks the best and ask the exchange for their allowance.
It’s important to practise these activities both in the context of an allowance and out of it, so your child learns to just help out without being given anything in return, too.
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