To think that too many parents don't equip there older teens for adult life.

[RedHillSunsets]

DD is awaiting her A-level results and should start uni in September. Some of her friends have already been in uni for a year. I left home at 18 to train as a nurse (pre uni courses) and had been taught to cook, budget and sort things out for myself in readiness for entering the adult world.
I have tried to ensure that DD is also prepared. She can drive, cook, and budget and has a current account, savings account, and LISA. She has had a part-time job since she was 15 and plans to continue working through uni as the job is in a field related to her degree. We discuss things like mortgages, income tax, NI, loans, credit cards, bills, and insurance as I think financial education is so important.
It shocks me how little financial awareness and basic life skills many of her peers have.

Did your parents teach you the life skills you needed and will you pass them on to your children?

We have done a lot of things with DC, so from when they were lower primary they set the table and came into the kitchen to see food being prepared and getting things from the fridge or the pantry. They can read an ingredients list they can get the ingredients out.

One of the things we did was come to work with Mum day as I was a sahm and did all housework in school hours so on a half term they basically shadowed me to see dishwasher traps being cleaned, bathrooms wiped down etc. I told them all the things I hated doing but needed to as an adult because they see adults as having control of the money and think we can just do what we want when we want.

Everyone cleared the table as a family effort, the children wiped and dried the table after dinner, came into the kitchen, dried anything handed to them, learned to hand wash things and no one got to leave until it was all done, both adults and children alike. They needed to see what goes into meal prep and the clean up. They were involved in a 3 weekly menu plan each time we overhauled it.

We talked about mortgages, showed them salary breakdowns with NI etc, utility bill prices, cost of garage services for the car, how much a meal out cost, took them to supermarkets and got them to check dates and compare prices even doing taste comparisons and marking things out of 10. Basically everything my parents had done with us.

Ds1 has just finished uni, he took a slow cooker in first year, then upgraded to a pressure cooker, cooked from scratch most of the time, budgeted well and had a mini hoover for his room and a flat head mop! I was so proud

I can’t speak for others but I didn’t know how to cook at uni and I love cooking now. In my favour was that I had a job working in a restaurant so was fed 3-4 nights a week and then spent the rest of my time getting by on picky bits. The only time I actually became motivated to be good at cooking was when I met my current partner 7 years ago and he said he’d come round to mine and what was I cooking. It became a thing, started out slowly with packet marinades and eventually graduated to doing them myself. Now I do most of the cooking for the pair of us and actively like it when people come round for dinner. I also knew nothing about bills and taught myself. You just learn.

There is budgeting and "budgeting".

Some people budget and leave no money for fun at all.
It's all from the same pot so fun money robs savings or is taken from savings.
I remember a girl at uni noting down every penny she spent and when we did a joint venture she asked for my share eg 10p
It made me shrivel up inside I couldn't believe it.
Her life seemed to miserable. But I bet she left with minimal debt.
I know v wealthy people who budget the same way however and their life seems utterly miserable.

The way we do it is seperate all money out including some for fun!
So we can enjoy ourselves knowing we are also going to have enough money for tood, for holidays for petrol.

That's how I teach mine to budget.

Also some dc get things sooner than others and are better than others. My youngest dc is far better at road sense, street wise, cooking than older dc.
Older dc is better at organising herself, homework getting exams and so on.

I don't recall my parents actively teaching me any of that kind of stuff but I guess I had absorbed some from observation and the rest of it I figured out as I went along. I mean surely if you're bright enough to be doing a degree you're not going to find it too much of a challenge to do a weekly shop and your own laundry even if you haven't done so before?
My children probably have more practical skills than I had as a teen by virtue of the fact that I've worked all their lives so I have expected them to contribute more to the running of the household than my Mum who was a SAHM ever expected of me or my siblings.
There's a YouTube tutorial or information online for virtually everything these days so I think it's probably easier to learn stuff nowadays. That said, my DD had to teach one of her flatmates in first year how to boil pasta which is a bit ridiculous!

I'm so glad my parents didn't consciously prepare me for adult life! For me, a huge part of the experience of life is LEARNING FOR MYSELF. Yes, I might have made some mistakes along the way... but I've done it MYSELF. I had a happy childhood, I love and appreciate my parents deeply, I owe them a great deal.... but I can be proud of my achievements as an adult, because I figured it out myself.
What's the point of telling someone how to 'be an adult'. Let them actually LIVE THEIR OWN LIFE, find their own way and then they can be truly independent- not, ironically, be able to function because Mummy told them how to do it.

I think there's a balance to be struck though.

I was the eldest child of a single mum where money was really tight. I was very prepared for leaving home as I'd had to be independent from an early age in relation to working, transport, finances, cooking etc.

Whilst it made me independent and mature, it also sucked a certain amount of joy out of my teenage years, and my part-time work definitely affected my academic results.

I've deliberately been more relaxed with my kids about some of these things others have taught their kids - they're learning by osmosis anyway and they have the rest of their lives to be an adult.

Lol.

If only university education equalled life skills and common sense, it would make my job so much easier.

But I do see with dismay, on WIWIKAU particularly, mums batch cooking meals for their kids to take with them to uni and basically continuing to parent as if their kids were still children, mentioning the loads of laundry they are doing for their kids etc; still making dentist appointments for them!

I'm with you on this. I once challenged a poster who said that their son couldn't cook. Her response was "because he was a boy"!!!!!

It's part of being a parent to teach our DC to be independent. If they aren't ready to look after themselves they need a gap year to grow up before going to university.

DD had a gap year and was very ready to fly the nest. I was staggered to learn that one of her flatmates in halls didn't even know that you had to remove the packaging from a pizza before you heat it up

I agree with you @RedHillSunsets

You couldn't be further from the truth in some cases.

The pizza girl in question was brainy and studying chemical engineering, but was completely lacking in common sense.

In my experience the ones who struggled the most at uni were those who were micromanaged, helicopter-parented and treated like a little kid through their teens.

You see it on MN a lot- I remember one thread recently where some posters would only let their teens go to organised clubs and hobbies and pre-planned visits to their friends (still contacting and arranging things with other parents even though their DC is 15 or 16 😳)

so it’s no wonder when they go to uni 18 months later they can’t cope

Mine are a lot younger but I am horrified by some of the posts I see - like "what does DD need for uni? What pots and pans? What bed linen?"

My parents got me to write a list and then talked it through with me and suggested some things I might have forgotten.

Similarly they got me to write out a budget and discuss it with them, rather than doing it all for me

Considering we all need to learn how to budget as it affects each and everyone of us, I think the education system should be overhauled and basic budgeting and life skills should be part of the curriculum.

In real life, what good is learning Pythagoras Theorem and the like? In what every day context will that ever be used?! How to budget would be a much more suitable module and far more beneficial.

My parents didn't equip me with a scrap of knowledge about anything financial, nor even encourage saving, and it took until well into my 30s for me to start taking it seriously and taking steps to educate myself.

Now at 40 I have a mortgage, no debt and enough savings to see me through about 6 months of expenses were I suddenly unable to work, but no pension to speak of and that keeps me up sweating at night.

Posted too soon; we have a baby now and from day one have been putting a bit aside each month for his future, and he'll be taught at appropriate stages the importance of saving, living within your means and how to do that, and once he starts work, pensions.

Mine didn’t teach me but my mum survived a bad upbringing and was doing the best she could. I was fine and I worked out the life stuff myself after burning a few dinners. Yes it was a bit harder but also you can’t blame your parents for everything forever.

Having said that, it is important to me to teach my own kids these skills.

Why are schools expected to do the job of parents? They want teachers to brush children's teeth and potty train them because parents are bone idle.

As a cautionary tale my parents didnt teach my brother and I anything really, everything was done for us.
Consequently my brother never moved out and still lives with my parents...
he is 54!😬

Common sense isn’t something that can be taught tbf

Young people are always going to seem like they have less common sense anyway as they have less experience to draw from.

As a child I picked up a fair bit by osmosis and had enough sense to work out the rest.
DM could be oddly defensive over things like the washing machine- I might break it but strangely didn't contest DB using it in what started as refusing to iron certain thick shirts and him deciding to do all his laundry in an oddly practical rebellion. Not sure why I would have been such a laundry liability though!

It's great to have a variety of skills but the most important is knowing how to fill the gaps. Recently DS (11) had a computer issue. We pointed out that we didn't know how to solve it so would look it up on youtube, so he may as well do that himself first.

They're not particularly practically minded children (some issues including dyslexia involved to varying extents) and doing Scouting has helped with skill development and dealing with some gaps we've overlooked.

Some families seem to be very anti learning life skills in case they destroy the innocence of childhood and seem to find it akin to forced child slave labour. Plunging young adult offspring into adult life without the skills to look after themselves doesn't do them any favours though.

Horrified?🤔

Asking for tips as to what not to waste money on is pretty sensible.

You don’t need a gap year to learn independence. What mollycoddling. You learn on the job as we all did- and survived.

The difficulty is that it becomes inter-generational ineptitude. If the children don't learn from their parents that toothbrushing is important and are never taken to dentists (aside from avaliability being an issue) then in 20 years we have yet another generation failing to teach their children, plus ending up with health issues that cost the state.

Basics shouldn't be left to schools, but if those gaps aren't externally filled, the problem passes on down and other issues arise.

Absolutely! My kids are better at cooking than me- I hate it so they didn’t learn that from me

That side of Maths has been more useful than anything else - can't get into the narrow gap to measure the longer side of the bathroom, but can measure two sides of a right angled triangle? That gives you the length of vinyl to buy. Need to run a cable/use an extension but don't know how long it should be? Pythagoras.

How many packs of laminate/tiles are needed to cover the room, give leeway for mistakes, cover each end piece but not spend out on the vast margin that shops benefit from telling you? They've got two finished ends, after all. Maths.

What diameter table is needed to fit 'there' but give enough room to use chairs? Maths.

Perhaps an alternative is mandatory parenting classes.