I wish I'd known ...

[resonant]

Thirteen is a terrific age -- smart, self-sufficient, involved enough with peers to have personal goals but not involved enough to find parental advice completely unwelcome.

But I look at the kidlet and I think, "Holy shit! You're going to be in high school in less than a year and a half!"

Yesterday I made an offhand reference to teaching her how to save money at the grocery store, and to my surprise, she was very interested in this. So I'm thinking I've got a window where she's old enough to learn anything I might want to teach her, but not so old that she doesn't want to hear it.

With that in mind, I throw out to my imaginary friends:

What do you wish someone had taught you before you left your parents' home?

Personally, I wish someone had taught me:

1. That my vocabulary and pattern-recognition abilities would not always be able to take the place of actual study skills. (It would have been tough going to persuade me of this.)
   
2. How to make and keep a budget.
   
3. How to plan and cook meals. (My mother taught me all sorts of recreational cooking, but never involved me in the more routine aspects. When I went to college, I could bake bread, but had to learn to cook rice out of a book.)
   
4. How to be assertive.
   
5. Some real information about getting the most out of college -- which my parents weren't in any position to teach me, since at that point my mother hadn't been to college and my dad only needed the piece of paper so he could get promoted at a government job.
   

Comments

[marina]

Oddly enough I was always better at saving money than my parents, but cooking and laundry is a big one.

Mostly I wish they'd taught me how to make those tasks fun. How to incorporate it into your life in a way that's not despair-inducing, and that practicing these skills means you'll do them quicker and better over time. Washing a floor. The military taught me how to wash toilets, do dishes, dust and mop and scrub, and that was a bit sad because the military is rubbish at those things. To this day I'm still mocked (lovingly) by my friends because my default ways of carrying out household tasks are the ways we were all taught in the military.

Another thing I wish they'd taught me was how to cope with being an entirely new environment surrounded by new people when you're an introvert. I mean again, they didn't have the experience to realistically teach me this, but I wish someone had. And I think this applies to college in the US as much as it applies to the military in Israel? The idea that you shouldn't stress yourself out about being social, but strive to be comfortable in your surroundings and branch out and try to meet new people when you're up for it. And that if you don't like the people you're with you can always try to make new friends, join a club, go to a meeting, branch out and change your circle of friends (which is much, much harder to do in highschool).

[giglet]

I wish they'd taught me was how to cope with being an entirely new environment surrounded by new people when you're an introvert.

I don't think I know how to do that even now! Thanks for the explanation.

[evith]

Self-care is a life skill I wish they taught in school. My kid is learning about how sleep, nutrition, and scheduling improve her happiness right now. It's not always something you can teach a kid, all you can do is model it. But if someone had introduced me to the idea of carrying index cards with things I needed to remember on them (for dealing with panic) or how to prepare to go out so that it was a good experience, my life would have been much improved.

[resonant]

The idea that you shouldn't stress yourself out about being social, but strive to be comfortable in your surroundings and branch out and try to meet new people when you're up for it. And that if you don't like the people you're with you can always try to make new friends, join a club, go to a meeting, branch out and change your circle of friends (which is much, much harder to do in highschool).

This is really, really useful, and most of the "getting along in new surroundings" advice out there is aimed at extroverts and written by people who think that extroversion = mental health.