I wish I'd known ...

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 them how to save money at the grocery store, and to my surprise, they were very interested in this. So I'm thinking I've got a window where they're old enough to learn anything I might want to teach them, but not so old that they don'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.
   

edited 2019 to retroactively correct the kidlet's gender pronouns