Our kids never stop learning life skills. Neither do we.

For those of us who worry we didn’t teach enough while our kids were younger

I drew this at the Portland Urban Sketchers meetup (apropos of nothing, I just wanted to show you)

From 2016-2021,

Christine Koh

and I co-hosted the Edit Your Life podcast so we could expand upon the ideas in our book, MINIMALIST PARENTING.

The through line: small steps lead to big changes.

One of our favorite topics was the importance of teaching kids life skills (or move-out skills, as I liked to call them). Our kids were pre-teens and teens at the time and we believed chores, allowance, and accountability would help them grow into functional, independent adults.

(Or so we hoped. There are no absolutes in parenting. Kids aren’t machines, and input doesn’t guarantee output.)

Spurred on by one of these conversations, we brainstormed a list of 100 life skills kids could learn in five minutes or less. Christine turned the list into a sharable graphic and it went viral, spawning conversations all over social media.

I was reminded of this when Christine re-shared the now seven year-old list in her recent newsletter which I encourage you to read as it’s full of gems like this👇:

If you are an adult who has ever been pissed off about a friend who expects you to do the adulting for them, or a colleague who always drinks the last of the coffee and never puts on a fresh pot, or a spouse who assumes laundry is your job, then you can see why life skills are essential to being in relationship with other human beings.

Smashing the patriarchy at home, 5 minutes at a time

Reading through the life skills list again rocketed me back to our conversations when my kids’ “functional adulthood” was theoretical. Now they’re actual adults.

How did it all work out?

I’m glad to report my kids are indeed functional adults, and like so much else, my parenting choices had only so much to do with it.

Now that I’m further down the parenting road with a wider lens and a longer arc, I’m relieved to find that my active teaching of life skills wasn’t always necessary. Sometimes it even got in the way.

Chores were a struggle when my kids were younger and their uptake of life skills was uneven. They picked up certain practical tasks easily enough, but others were a fight or took a frustratingly long time to learn. Some just fell off the list.

With the benefit of hindsight, I now know that life skills, like other childhood “learnings,” are on their own inscrutable timeline.

This is obvious only in retrospect, sort of like looking back on potty training and knowing now that when it happened mattered less than if it happened.

Here’s how I put it on Notes:

Feels good to revisit [the list] now that I’ve witnessed my kids’ competence as adults. Some of these skills only “took” after they were on their own and taught themselves.

When I was in the middle of parenting, I sometimes felt “behind” or like I’d failed in some way when my experience didn’t follow the traditional timeline. This was a welcome reminder that kids keep learning as adults and some skills just take the time they take.

I’m committed to the importance of teaching young kids life skills. I’m proud Christine and I amplified that message and helped parents put it into practice.

Also:

Life never stops handing us new tasks and we never stop learning how to manage them (or deftly palm them off on someone else). 😉

We’re all getting older and wiser. It’s an encouraging thought.

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📝 NOTES OF NOTE

• 📚 Christine’s and my book, MINIMALIST PARENTING (Routledge, 2013), at Amazon and Bookshop.org listings (affiliate links).

• 🎧 Listen to Edit Your Life! Christine publishes new episodes every week.

• Mom’s in the hospital after a fall. She’s stable and healing, but the road to recovery will be long. Newsletters will be spotty while I figure things out. The dime on which things turn…

• Re-upping my recommendation to subscribe to

  Learn From My Mistakes
  in which
  Lauren Klinger
  shares the stuff she wishes someone had told her when she was caring for her aging parents.

• Caregiver tip: give companies the opportunity to help you. I let the Costco manager know that Mom’s mobility problems make in-person shopping difficult and I’d like to take it over for her. I asked for an exception to the rule that household account members must live at the same address. He didn’t bat an eye and now I’M A CARD-CARRYING GOLD STAR MEMBER, BABY. 🤘🏽⭐️

  

  Mom & me at Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood, Oregon

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🗄️ IN THE ARCHIVES

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Thanks for reading Parent of Adults, my invitation to compare notes on life beyond the empty nest. I’m Asha Dornfest, a Portland, Oregon-based author & parent of two young adults.

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