5 Skills to Teach Your Teen Before Sending Them to College

In the 21st century, preparing high school seniors for college is crucial for success. Focus shifts from academics only as student debts and dropout rates rise. Does high school provide enough lessons to survive? Lack of specific tools is minimum training to handle the demands of such change. Parents who teach teens skills before college ensure a better experience at all levels.

Independence

Independence is vital for survival in college. A mature person learns to balance commitments, part-time jobs, and courses simultaneously. Teens learn independence, for example, through monthly volunteering and assigned chores. Laundry, paying bills, cooking, and grocery shopping represent few of the primary tasks to acquire. Every teen should learn and retain lessons on personal responsibility such as taking care of pets or other animals, being financially wise, maintaining good physical health (including good physical and dental hygiene), and mental health. Individuals who nurture good study behaviors almost always obtain better grades. An independent teen navigates all of these things responsibly. As part of the independence, perhaps working with a school counselor or employment specialist to find out what you are good at or what kind of jobs the teen may fit is another good place to start being an adult.

Automobile Maintenance

Teens need training on proper car maintenance. Parents should teach necessary lessons in roadside assistance, monitoring gas, and using temperature gauge. As young drivers, discussing the importance of oil change and checking tires for punctures or air leaks is necessary. To handle other emergencies such as flat tires, guidance in changing tires is beneficial.

Laundry and Other Household Skills

Many teens grow up in homes where they have limited responsibilities in terms of cleaning and other home maintenance tasks. While it is important to care for your child, it’s also important to teach them how to take care of themselves. One common area of household chores that teens typically lack is the ability to do their own laundry. Rather than have your child arrive home each break with a hamper full of clothes for you to wash, take the time to teach them some laundry basics. These include: how to wash a comforter, separating clothes into whites and colors, and how to dry different items of clothing and linens. Without the right guidance, teens can make disastrous laundry mistakes. For example, they could put an entire duvet through the wash, rather than just removing and washing the cover.

Budgeting and Other Business Skills

Budgeting is a natural skill to master since it is basic math. At least 45% of adults practice regularly and reap the long-term benefit of controlling household spending. This powerful tool directs spending and saving. Successfully mastering basic banking of preventing an overdrawn account, stems from hard-core budgeting. Parents who encourage wise saving and spending set the foundation for financial freedom. Teach your children to appreciate and seek to fully understand math, as it will help them in the future to begin to understand budgeting techniques, interest rates, and other important life decisions they will have to make. There will be calculators to help with this, but they will still need to know which number signifies what, and when and why to use it.

Time Management

Punctuality is important, and these habits are necessary in life. Constant snooze of an alarm departs from proper time management. Practice begins when kids arrive early for soccer games or submit assignments before deadlines. A student who values time manages any schedule wisely.

The next phase is life after college. While many grads appreciate the lessons learned, others regret the choices made. It’s a parent’s role to prepare seniors for success. The personal gain earned from the experience is memorable. Let’s teach our graduates the skills. It is not our desire to model parents who wish they did, or those who regret few lessons were taught.