Current Mood: Surprised

I had a conversation with a friend of mine this morning. He lives in Europe. I told him that I was knitting, and he said that knitting was a very large part of their country’s lifestyle. So important, in fact, that it is taught in school. So we talked back and forth about homemaking classes and such in school, and he said that they have whole schools dedicated to teaching homemaking. That got me to thinking… Why don’t we have schools like this? Required classes in school or some kind of prep school to teach teens and young adults basic life skills? While you may scoff at this, there are many, many people that enter the adult world without these living skills. My poor husband, bless him, is one of these people. So, using him as a model, I will relate how people are unleashed into the world without knowledge.

My husband moved directly from his parents’ house to mine, so he has never truly lived on his own. The man that I married was severely lacking in life skills. He couldn’t cook because his mother always cooked. He didn’t know how to sort laundry, another thing she always did. He did know how to mend, because his mother was a seamstress. So my husband, at 21 years old, was really not ready to enter the world of independent living. It’s not because he didn’t want to know, but because he was never taught by enforcing it. Read: chores.

I see this repeatedly today, where families will rely on one person to do a particular chore (or they just don’t do it at all by going out to eat, having a housekeeper, drop-off laundry, etc). This leaves children sorely ill-equipped to live on their own. Granted, the way that many of our baby boomer (and older) generations were raised, the man has certain household things he does, the woman has certain household things she does. The man passes on his knowledge to his sons, the woman passes on her knowledge to her daughters. The man changes the tires and mows the lawn. The woman sews on buttons and dusts. Yes, it’s 2010, and many people are making sure that their children are more well-rounded than these traditional roles (and many have not grown up in traditional households), but there are still a lot of people that are lacking this basic knowledge of living.

Here’s a small list of things every adult should know how to do:

• Personal finances; such as budgeting, balancing a checkbook (especially debits!), savings, bill paying, etc
• Basic car maintenance, especially changing a tire
• How to follow a recipe
• How to do laundry, including stain removal
• How to mend/repair clothing
• How to use a plunger
• How to sharpen a knife
• How to replace a fuse (hey, I have a fuse box downstairs!), use a circuit breaker, etc
• How to turn off gas and water to the house (you never know when a line will burst)
• How to change a furnace/air conditioner filter, and how often
• Properly washing dishes by hand (first glasses, then silverware, then plates, then greasy stuff)
• How (and why) to dust
• How to wash windows
• How (and why) to find wall studs
• How to properly build a fire (yeah, really)
• How to mow the lawn, along with basic mower maintenance
• Basic home repair, such as nailing down a loose stair, using caulk, etc.
• How to insert tab A into slot B (basic building instructions)

I know that not everyone has the facilities to teach these things, such as apartment living, but these are very important things to know. Of course some things are age/life appropriate. You’re not going to teach your four year old how to clean out gutters (I hope!), and you can’t really show your kid how to turn off gas to the house if you don’t have a gas main. Oh wait… do YOU know how to turn off the gas? What if there was an earthquake or some other major catastrophe?

Some of these things also require us to get past our own personal laziness. Why mend clothes when you can go just buy new ones? Because we just don’t know if our children will have the money to buy new clothes. Why teach them to chop veggies when there’s meals in a box? Because they may be interested in exploring culinary things. You might have a chef living under your roof!

Please, please pass your life skills on to your children. They will need to know these things later. Dads, teach your daughters how to replace drain pipes. Moms, teach your sons how to sew a button on. When you come upon one of these basic life things, make sure that your kids are watching. It is preparing them for living on their own. Oh yeah, it’s also a good excuse for assigning chores!

And if you’re an adult that doesn’t know how to do these basic things, please do ask. If someone looks at you like you are stupid, explain to them that it’s a skill that you were never taught. And if you truly are embarrassed, or you don’t have a friend that knows how to do a particular thing (not everyone knows how to patch a leaky basement wall), look it up. Not only on the Internet, but also get books. Yeah, you know, those big stacks of paper bound together with colorful covers that impart information? Because you never know, there may be a day that we no longer have the Internet, but we will still know how to read.