Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. -Proverbs 22:6
Start now teaching your children home and life skills. As toddlers they can learn so much more than we think due to their developing brains acting like sponges for information. Teaching them these kinds of skills is very important, it teaches them responsibility and makes them feel needed. The skills you teach them now, they can use the rest of their lives. Not to mention teaching them different skills can help you out around your house. All moms could use a little help around that area in our lives.
One skill we taught our kids is feeding the animals. We have a small zoo at our home that consist of chickens, rabbits, dogs, cats, and a bearded dragon. Each one of our kids takes care of certain animals, they have to make sure they have food and water and clean up after them. Our oldest takes care of his bearded dragon, he has to feed him every morning, make sure his water is fresh and get him out everyday to play with him. Our little girl is responsible for one of the rabbits and the cats. She is to feed them and make sure water is full. And our youngest is responsible for feeding our smallest dog because he has to have certain food. These types of skills teach them responsibility. They know that if they don’t do their morning chore of feeding they will have to do the consequence for not completing that task. Our kids have other responsibilities throughout the day but depending on what needs to be done it can change from day to day which helps teach them that life can be unpredictable and you must be flexible enough to bend so that you don’t break.
Some other home and life skills you can teach your children can be:
- cooking
- cleaning
- grocery shopping
- making a grocery list
- mowing the yard
- laundry
We also teach and talk to our kids about survival skills such as hunting, fishing, building a campfire, and cooking on a campfire. My husband and I enjoy hunting and have made it a point to teach our kids that sometimes it is necessary to take the life of an animal but it is only to be done for three reasons.
- Feeding your family
- Protecting yourself or another
- Putting a humane end to a suffering animal
Teaching kids home and life skills on the homestead
My parents have a homestead and process their own food so our kids have helped out with sectioning out a pig for food, and cleaning a chicken and gardening all of which fall into the first category of feeding our family. Unfortunately we used to raise goats and my husband had to put one down due to an illness that she could not recover from and was suffering terribly so we had the chance to explain to them why we had to make this choice. We have been sure to teach them that our Lord put animals on this earth to feed us, as well as allowing us to enjoy their beauty. At our home the only “farm animal” we have now are chickens since our property is on less than an acre, but we are able to teach our children some skills just through raising chickens. Some skills children can learn from taking care of chickens are:
- caring for an animal when they are sick
- taking care of bumble foot (which is an infection in the foot)
- how to get rid of chicken mites
- cleaning out a chicken coop
- how to incubate fertile eggs
- raising chicks
- creating a safe living area for them
If you are not into the whole homesteading thing a simple skill you can teach your child to start a garden. It doesn’t even have to be a big garden, it can be a couple flower pots and your child’s favorite vegetable. Gardening teaches them about growing their own food so they don’t have to rely on the food at the grocery store, as well as teaching them how to care for and nurture something. If you home school you can also use this as teaching moments in your home of how plants grow, what they need to grow, and how to harvest the vegetables. We home school our kids so all these things are taught because we believe it is the best way to prepare them for life.