Why acquire new skills?
In a world of fast-paced changes, kids should be trained in many skills
My eldest daughter has just finished her first year of college and returned home for the summer break. We’ve had many discussions since then, with the most notable one being the ‘young invalid’ discussion, where my daughter mentioned how unprepared college students are when it comes to basic life skills, like doing laundry, vacuuming the floor, cooking quick meals, picking up their stuff in the bathrooms, etc. All the horror stories I’ve heard about her college bathrooms and laundry rooms!
She mentioned that it would have been nice to have classes in cooking, basic finances (what a credit card is, how to balance a checkbook, how to budget, how to start investing at a young age), and cleaning, for example. I agreed with her and started teaching my son, Michael, some of the tasks this summer:
How to vacuum his room
How to do his laundry
How to wash his plates and utensils after eating (no, I don’t expect him to do that for everyone in our family, but I want him to be able to wash his own dishes)
How to sort garbage from recycling. He is already taking out the bins every week and bringing them back in, once garbage and recycled materials are picked up
How to balance a checkbook - since he started working, he has been getting paychecks. He set up alerts on his phone to receive notifications whenever his debit card is used
How to apply for a credit card and how it’s different from debit/checking
How to cut the grass with a lawnmower
How to use a weed wacker
How to advocate for himself - Michael was asked already a couple of times to work as a lifeguard at pools, which he is not assigned to. He agreed, but we both felt that coming for 2 hours of lifeguarding drills once a week and then going back home was not a good use of his time. So, I suggested he ask to be assigned a lifeguarding shift on the days he does the drills. Lo and behold, his manager accommodated his request
The list above is not at all exhaustive. I thought of another task I would like my husband to teach our son. Last week, while picking up Michael from rowing, I noticed that one of the coaches’ cars would not start. It was a 16-year-old rower girl who came to the rescue - the car battery was dead, but she was able to revive it by using a jump starter. It is clear that either her parents or one of the relatives taught her that skill, a skill that might become handy for any one of us. It would also be useful to know how to pump air into your tires or have them changed, in case they get flat.
Adding on to the skills I want to develop in my son, I signed him up for a trade skills camp. Even though it was relatively short, he was taught how to make an electrical cord, cut and fuse pipes as part of his welding class, and shown what a plumber’s day typically looks like. After the camp, Michael rejected the idea of becoming a plumber or an electrician. He felt that both jobs would make him die of boredom; nevertheless, I asked him to keep his mind open and still try to get a certification in each, not because he will become an electrician or a plumber, but because he can then potentially fix issues at his future house(s). Out of all the trades, he seemed to like welding the most, and we agreed he’d do a more thorough welding camp next summer.
Other useful skills might be swimming, diving with a parachute, flying a plane, doing CPR or a Heimlich maneuver, because you don’t know what kind of obstacles you might encounter later in life. In October of 2013, for example, two young engineers, aged 19 and 21, died in a fire on a wind turbine in the Netherlands. They were performing maintenance when a short circuit triggered a fire in the engine room. They were trapped at the top of the turbine and burned alive. Logically, it would have made sense to have parachutes and any individuals working on turbines, skyscrapers, or top floors of multi-story buildings trained to jump with them. They are not that expensive and don’t occupy much room. When it comes to swimming and flying an airplane, the number of natural disasters has been increasing, so it makes sense to have those skills.
And then, there is a level of satisfaction of knowing and being able to do something on your own. When Michael recently learned to pull a drowned person out of a pool and do CPR as part of his lifeguard training, he felt a sense of pride and satisfaction from having learned that skill.
My husband felt the same kind of pride when he helped a young man in his karate dojo several weeks ago. A guy dislocated his shoulder during one of the practices and started screaming in agonizing pain. No one, it seemed, knew what to do. Should they take him to the ER? My husband, who saw his father putting dislocated shoulders back into the sockets in the past, repeated what he was taught when he was a teenager. It took him split seconds, and the pain was gone.
Or my college daughter, who was taught to make Origami stars by our Okinawan friends from the karate school when she was 9 years old. A couple of weeks ago, the same Okinawans came back from Japan and, to show appreciation for their visit, my daughter wrote a thank you card in Japanese (with the help of her Vietnamese college friend, who knows Japanese quite well) and made the same Origami stars she learned to make with them. Ceremodial traditions, such as Origami art, are deeply ingrained in the Okinawan/Japanese culture, so it was a sense of pride that my daughter felt when making those stars for the Okinawan sensei and his wife.
That’s the same approach I would like for all my kids to have, regardless of the skill they are acquiring - a sense of pride and satisfaction that they have mastered something new that might become useful later in their life, if not for them, then for others around them. In terms of explaining why learning new skills is important, a concept known as ‘lifelong training,’ it is worth mentioning that lifelong learning has been linked to increased longevity and improved quality of life.
When it comes to education, in general, a recent study demonstrated that life expectancy increases, with key takeaways being the following:
“Each additional year of education reduces the risk of death by about 2%.
The benefits of an 18-year education are comparable to eating enough vegetables in your diet.
More education leads to increased resources that can help a person build a healthy lifestyle.”
So, for someone with a master’s degree, for example, mortality risk is reduced by 34%:
The longevity-boosting power of education
If you explain the health implications of learning a new skill or continuing education, you are more likely to get a buy-in from your kids. Many times, they will challenge your thinking, claiming that what you are preaching to them is absolutely useless. That’s when you resort to data and scientific articles to back up what you are saying.
