Essential Life Skills You Need to Teach Your Daughter

When you are raising a girl, you want her to be independent and one day able to take care of herself and her own home. To be sure this happens, you should teach her some essential life skills. The following ones are things every girl (and boy) should know how to do.  

Basic Planting

  An excellent skill to teach your daughter before she moves out on her own is basic planting and growing skills. If she can plant a seedling, that is good to learn how to do it. Many children will learn the basic skill during their early years of school, but you might want to give her a few more lessons when she gets a little older. Teach her how to plant a vegetable or herb garden, how to prune roses, and how to water plants and know which ones need watering. This can also be a fun activity for you and her.  

First Aid

  It is good for every child to learn first aid, so teach your daughter some simple first aid techniques. She should know how to treat a bee sting, what to do when she gets a deep cut, and how to dress a burn or laceration. You want to know that when she is on her own, or when your daughter is younger and playing outside, she knows the basic rules of taking care of minor injuries and cuts. This ensures she can avoid infection and know how to take care of herself, as well as to know when she needs to go to the doctor or hospital.  

House Repairs

  A good skill to start teaching your daughter when she is around 12 or 13 is how to take care of home repairs. She should know just minor things around the house that she might want to do on her own one day. For example, make sure your daughter knows how to clear a clogged sink or toilet, and how to use an auger instead of calling a plumber every time. She should know how to change light bulbs, put new batteries in the smoke detectors, and hammer nails. You might also want to teach her how to paint interior walls, as well.  

Finances

  Another life skill your daughter should know how to do is to budget her money, pay bills, and balance her checkbook. A lot of this is now done online, but she also needs to know the basics of budgeting and how to save money. Teach her about saving at least 10 percent of her income and how to come up with a realistic budget and stick to it. This will definitely help her in the future.

The real reason why stay at home Moms don’t get anything done is due to….information overload.

What Is Information Overload?

  Have you ever started something new – a new job, a new sport, even a new game and you’re trying to learn the information and it feels like your brain might explode? That’s an exaggerated symptom of information overload. But, most people are experiencing it daily from normal life due to fast access to information via the internet. Stay at home Mom’s especially are dealing with an incredible amount of information overload.  

Information overload can cause the following symptoms:

• Headache
• Stress
• Moodiness
• Overweight
• Cardiovascular issues
• And more…

Plus, often it can cause problems in interpersonal relationships and work relationships. The reason is that most information overload is a choice you make. You choose to be on social media all day; you choose to watch every single news station and every single pundit on TV talk about whatever is the topic of the day.  

It’s Like Drinking Water from a Fire Hydrant

  Anytime you want to learn something, it’s tempting to start gathering tons of information. And due to the net, it’s easy to get drawn down into the rabbit hole of unending information. It becomes hard to determine what information is good and what information is bad.  

It Leads to Poor Information Filtering

  When you are bombarded with so much information, your brain can’t filter it properly. Your brain does something called twigging, which means that instead of filtering information in terms of importance it just generalizes all information as being the same. This is terrible for decision making.  

It Leads to Bad Choices

  If you can’t properly filter information to determine what is true, what is right and what is wrong, you’ll have a hard time making the right choices. The information overload causes you to choose wrongly on any number of issues because with so much noise going on you can’t determine what is right.  

It Harms Your Relationships

  Information overload can harm your relationships. If you’re always reading your smartphone, looking at social media and aren’t present in your life, it can hurt intimacy. If your partner and friends are complaining, take heed.  

It Leads to Black and White Thinking

  The world is not black and white. The world is colorful, black, white, gray and everything in between and more. The same can be said for a lot of issues. There are very few issues that are either right or wrong, black or white.   If you have too much information at your fingertips and are rating everything the same, it’s easy to see things as black and white, which can make it hard to negotiate a happy life and successful business.  

It Can Lead to Mental Issues Like Depression

  When you get to the point of information overload, a lot of people experience mental problems such as short-term memory issues and even depression. If you find that you’re just feeling mixed up a lot, forget appointments and aren’t doing your best at home or work, consider information overload as a potential culprit.   Information overload can be a big problem for a lot of people. People are wrecking their cars due to not being able to turn away from looking at their text messages. Who knows how much money is lost in overall productivity due to information overload.   You can do your part by trying to limit information overload for yourself and your family. You can also encourage co-workers and employees to avoid multitasking and focus training on smaller topics rather than broad ones.