Building Life Skills

Gooood day @motherhood hope you have been safe and well.

Thank you to everyone who has been following my blogs and reading them. Thank you to all the wonderful parents out there continuing to contribute to our wonderful parenting community. It is great being able to read so many wonderful blogs about peoples families from around the world and learning so much more about being a parent and picking up some additional skills along the way!

I love helping my children build new paractical skills that can be applied throughout life. In fact life skills is what has helped me so much now as an adult. I grew up with my grandparents who were Italian migrants to Australia and they didn't have much money. Being farmers from a small town Tropea back then. Although the images now of Tropea are absolutely beautiful. I will have to visit one day. They were farmers so didn't have much wealth at the time of arriving to Australia. A lot of things were done by hand and I still maintain those traditions today.

Those traditions have helped me maintain a healthy lifestyle by cooking my own meals from scratch. Something I do often with my children. I have also developed other life skills in construction, carpentary and general house husband duties. I have found these are life skills not many in my age have anymore and many just hire others to do these jobs for them. If they can't afford to it just sits there undone which can be a danger.

I am super keen to hand down these traditions and skills to my children so you will often find us working on things together. Even using power tools, yes power tools! which require supervision but you shouldn't be scared because injury occurres when we use things without knowing how. So teaching confidence young helps kids in their adult lives.

Little Miss has been using power tools since she was 3 years old, you might remember the sand pit we put together where she first handled the drill and while she was scared and needed support she is now super confident with the drill. Although I was scared her hair would be caught in the drill but she reassured me she knew what she was doing. I think next time I will tie her hair back just to reduce my anxiety. I am happy to report that no injury or hair was damaged, so she was right.

This weekend we bought a cabinet that required assembly and little miss asked me if she could do it, naturally this caused a battle between little miss and little bloke who also wanted to put it together. So we got to work all assembling the product and while little bloke wanted to use the drill on his own, he still required support until he can utilise it safely.

Little Miss on the other hand was an absolute wiz and the additional benefit is that she can now read! So that means I sat by her while teaching her also how to read instructions and follow them through. That was hard and I hope she doesn't do the ol Dad thing by thinking we don't need instructions :) Although the entire thing would have been faster if I put it together myself. It is important to bring the children along on this journey so they can learn through experience and in life achieve things without having to be reliant on other people.

Resiliance begins at home and the best way to overcome adversity in later life is to have a strong foundational skillset that will enable you to build on and overcome the barriers you face.

I am pretty proud of little miss and no doubt little bloke to will grow up knowing how to do many things on his own.

For the best experience view this post on Liketu