Teaching Your Children Skills for Life

Homeschooling your child brings with it the opportunity to teach your child the necessary life’s skill in addition to the entire academic lessons that you will be teaching.  In fact many of the life skills that you will teach will be far more important and will have a much more long lasting effect that many of the planned out academic lessons deemed necessary. While some of these life skills will be learned through osmosis, many of them need to be stressed in ordered for them to be fully learned and practiced. Many of these skills can be learned while being integrated into your daily lesson plans.

Communication skills 

By far one of the key skills you can teach your child is good communication skills. Good communication skills will assist your child in developing self confidence, a good sense of self-worth, and better relationships with you and others. Children are not born as good communicators they need to be taught this skill.  In order to teach your child to communicate well with you and others, you need to teach your child to express themselves by actually listening to them and hearing what they have to say. Try to remove all distractions, turn off the TV, shut off the phone and give them your undivided attention.  Train your child to look you in the eye and focus on you while they are speaking.  Discuss with your child what you just heard, engage them into conversation a show him/her how to explain their thoughts clearly.

Social skills 

Proper communication, problem-solving, decision making, self-management, and peer relations abilities are the social skills which allow one to initiate and maintain positive social relationships with others. Children that do not display proper social behavior are very often incapable of maintaining lasting relationships and can also interfere with learning.  Many children posses inborn social skills and don’t need help in this area at all.  However, especially in a home school setting, where children have very little opportunity to interact with pears, teaching and practicing social skills is of utmost importance in order for them to succeed. There are many tools that can assist you. In fact there are many special needs toys and games available that focus on social interaction and can do so much in the way of promoting social skills in a relaxed and fun atmosphere. 

Self Management Skills 

Teaching children to manage and be responsible for their actions is a key skill as well. The first step towards teaching children self management skills would be for you as a parent to conduct an assessment of your child.  You need to evaluate what your child is capable of doing on their own.  Toilet training your child is something that needs to be done, yet before taking the task on, you need to evaluate whether your child is ready and prepared to complete this skill.  At every stage there is different self management skills that you can expect your child to master.  Once you have prepared your child to be responsible for this task make sure to keep track of whether they complete what they are now supposed to be doing. If they are responsible for making their bed, make sure it done properly and in a timely fashion in order for it to be regularly maintained.  A responsible and independent individual will be a successful individual.

There are so many diverse life skills that are of a parent’s responsibility to teach their child.  Mastering these skills will go a long way in ensuring your child’s ultimate success which is every parent’s life goal.

Susan Goodman is pediatric therapist and a social media director for funandfunction.com.  With her many years of experience with working with children hands-on, she guides customers in purchasing innovative products to further enhance their child’s development.