Teaching life skills

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My step daughter will be going to university next year. She has zero life skills. For example last week she asked me how to cut cheese and she’s never done it before. She doesn’t know how to make a cup of tea and has all meals made for her and delivered to her room. She doesn’t know how to work a washing machine etc. I am encouraging her father to start teaching her some life skills but he thinks she won’t be interested and says she will work it out. I think this is cruel and it would be far kinder to start teaching her so she knows how to do things before she goes to university next year. Any feedback? Experience? Views?

Ideally yes, some life skills ahead of university would be a good idea, but she would probably cope in the end. I shared a house at uni with a girl who's parents had run and lived above a pub and she had never been allowed in the kitchen as all meals came from the pub kitchen. She had zero kitchen skills or confidence at the beginning of the year, but we all helped her and she came out of the end of uni with a degree and the ability to cook for herself.

Take this as an opportunity to teach her the skills she's asked about. It could be a fun time. Although I think her DF and DM should be doing it.

Yes, teach her! She'll have enough to get to grips with at uni without having to pick up basic life skills. Also, if she doesn't know how to clean up after herself (especially in shared areas, such as kitchen and bathroom), she will be very unpopular with her flatmates.

Now is the time. No reason why she shouldn’t be doing her own laundry and getting involved in cooking over the summer.

Whether she’s interested isn’t really relevant, she needs to learn. I cleaned the bathroom this morning and it wasn’t because I was going to have such a lovely time doing it.

I’d also teach things like how to have a bit of a plan for meals and to how to do a supermarket shop, plus some budgeting skills.

I remember seeing a young lad who was clearly a new student, standing in front of all the washing powders looking completely lost. I wanted to give him a hug and tell him to just buy the one they had at home.

How is it all these clueless young people have never actually seen anyone make a cup of tea, or whatever it is they can't do, and noticed how they go about it? Are they all spectacularly unobservant or are they all glued to their phones and oblivious to what goes on around them?