How to not go over credit card monthly limit would be a good one too
I was just thinking that one that isn’t essential, but might really be useful, would be how to use affinity programs for airlines, hotel chains, etc. Some of them give pretty big benefits if you can get lifetime status. I wish I had started accumulating Marriott Points much sooner than I did, for example.
@Marian There are people who are thrown into less than favorable situations all the time and come out swinging. A friend of mine left his house when he was 18. He cut off all ties with his family and lived on the streets and didn’t have a clue what he was doing. As of right now he’s got a good job, a stable relationship with his new girlfriend, and a comfortable place to live.
In my opinion, not everyone is cut from the same cloth. Some people get to sit in the womb of college for a long time while all their expenses are taken care of by others.
Anyway, my point is that it doesn’t matter what is expected from a person, but rather what is demanded. If everything goes crazy a person needs to be ready to do something to keep themselves afloat and this is especially true for college students. More and more of them are coming from unstable living conditions where they have had to struggle to get where they are. Everyone is different and I think that it’s safe to say being prepared for the worst is better than assuming that everything will be peachy until one has finished their education.
You don’t have to know everything or even a little of anything. You just have to have some sort of idea of what you can do if your plans don’t work out. This carries through all aspects of life.
P.S. I know i used “you” alot here but that’s just bad word choice. I mean it in a manner of indifference and you can replace it with “one” or “oneself” etc.
Thank you @shawbridge
I know from experience that a person’s world can fall apart at anytime and that people have to have some sort of escape plan for when the rug gets pulled out from underneath oneself.
There is also the matter of reading the instructions, which are sometimes printed on the item.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_extinguisher#/media/File:FireExtinguisherABC.jpg
Some of the car-related things mentioned previously (e.g. how to change a flat tire) are detailed in the car’s owner’s manual.
I couldn’t do most of this at 16.
As a child I was not allowed to use an oven or stove, period. As such, I didn’t get the opportunity to learn to cook until adulthood. Now I can cook if I have a recipe, but I have to follow the instructions.
I was never taught how to do laundry as a kid. I learned this skill at a Job Corps center as an adult.
Nope. I’m 24 now, and I don’t know how to drive a car, much less fix one. That isn’t likely to change any time soon, because I don’t have any need for a driver’s license or the money or time for driving lessons. What I can do is navigate public transportation easily and do some basic bicycle maintenance (really need to learn how to change brake and shifter cables, though).
This I can do, and did do at 16, but now I choose not to because Mom isn’t around to make me.
If by grocery shop you mean go into a grocery store and buy things I want, I do that all the time. If you mean get groceries for a week, nope. I’m used to going to the grocery store 5 minutes walk from my home whenever I want something rather than shopping for a whole week, and I don’t typically cook my own meals anyway.
I usually have an empty bank account. When I get my paycheck, it goes away fast.
I love bicycling now, but I didn’t learn how to ride a bike until I was 21.
This I can do, but mostly because I study college geography and enjoy it to the point where I own plenty of maps.
Well, S & D could do all of the above except #3, but that’s why we have AAA and good mechanics we trust. I can’t do #3 either, but H COULD but prefers to keep our mechanics happily employed.
How to negotiate public transportation.
A lot of these are situational. In my hometown, there’s not really any public transportation to speak of. You’d have to go someplace else to use such a thing, and not everyone has that opportunity. And I think that you can go through life without knowing how to order the proper wine. I have friends who don’t drink at all-they hardly need to know what to order. No 16 yo does either, since they have another 5 years to be legal enough even order it. These 16 yo’s just Google everything anyway. Cars-no way do you need to fix a whole car to survive. Know who to call that you TRUST to fix it. And air travel-same as public transportation. Lots of people don’t fly until they leave home, and maybe not even then.
I think what kids REALLY need to know by 16 are actual, real day-to-day tasks like basic sewing, cooking, using a bank, going to the doctor, the pharmacy, making appointments of various kinds, addressing and stamping mail, doing laundry. These are things that they’ll be doing much more likely than ordering wine. Some of these “musts” are for children of privilege or from large urban areas, or both. Most kids are neither.
Sometimes people who live where the public transportation is not useful may not realize that it is useful in some other places. So they may land at the airport, rent a car, get stuck in traffic jams driving into downtown, then pay absurd amounts for parking in downtown, instead of just taking the subway that will get them to their downtown hotel more quickly and cheaply.
My upper middle class kids have no idea how to order wine. Neither do my H and me. We rarwly drink. I couldn’t even tell you whether Chardonnay, Cabernet, Pinot Grigio etc are red or white. I’ve been told, but it goes in one ear and out the other. It’s of zero importance in our lives. If I were throwing a wedding or something where I needed to order a wine, I’d ask my dad who knows a lot about fine wine. But do it myself? Nope. No need. About number 1000 on the list of skills my kids need to develop.
How to PAY TOLLS on a highway. We have an automatic toll reader/scanner in our car and DD had never seen the ticket that the toll attendants give those who Don’t have the reader and didn’t realize we had to go through that line and have cash to pay the collector.
Guys, if you are worried about this, there is an expedient medium that doesn’t seem to hurt your social standing. It’s to simply and quickly align the sheets and covers and pull them up to the pillows. No hospital corners, no quarter-bouncing, and no complicated pillow tucking and fluffing required. It takes maybe a fifth to a tenth the time of all the other fancy maneuvers and still looks…presentable.
Guys, with respect to choosing wine, the tongue was firmly in the cheek, in part because so many of the skills listed here strike me as so far from critical to teach by 16 and some are pretty funny – give a moving eulogy or a witty toast (I assumed that was tongue-in-cheek also).
There are many skills listed like using public transportation that a kid with problem-solving skills, common sense and a proactive style can figure out. If we teach those plus empathy and some Institutional knowledge like what is required if there is a car accident, they will be ok.
My views are colored by my own experience: I had very few life skills when I graduated from high school at age 16. I probably could have done 0 out of 6 on the OP’s original list and still don’t do many. But, despite that, I had summer jobs starting in HS, was admitted to an elite college, got a job in my first week at college and was employed all during college, was admitted to the best grad schools in the world in my field, flew cross-country to attend one, bought a car there (age 21?), left that grad program, moved back to the East Coast for another grad school, rented an apartment, taught myself how to cook (Chinese food, though I am not Chinese, but shared a house with some serious foodies including a former chef turned demography grad student so I decided to learn something different), managed my budget, … . Despite not being able to manage money at age 16, I was a professor at an elite business school, worked as an investment banker and in private equity, helped start a hedge fund, started a couple of companies, and don’t seem to be doing too badly financially. I do my shopping now at Costco as supermarkets have too many choices and charge too much. I still don’t make beds. I now can do the laundry but can’t fold worth a damn. And, on the others, I would have been petrified to speak in public when I was 16 but now get asked to speak to groups of 400 or 1000. In short, if you help your kids with the problem-solving skills, common sense and proactivity, they should be able figure it out. As a consequence of life, we spend a lot of time with quite well-to-do and/or well-known folks and so it actually is helpful to feel comfortable for them in upscale settings. Hence, the wine. But is this a critical life skill? No.
In thinking about institutional knowledge, I had one counter-intuitive thought that I haven’t yet shared with my kids. I have just been listening to Serial and John Grisham’s The Innocent Man and began reflecting on a few incidents people I know have had with police who seemed perfectly happy to lie or violate agreements without remorse if they thought it would help them. I would consider teaching my kids that one has to be wary of police and to assume that some are primarily interested in closing cases and have much less concern about integrity. Thus, understanding your legal rights well and not talking to police without at least consulting with a lawyer is probably good advice. This is a big change of positions for me, but I have come to the conclusion that while many officers act with integrity, enough don’t that one should proceed warily and without trust. If I were advising a young black male, I’d probably suggest avoiding police at almost all costs. That actually might be a critical life-preserving skill.
In that case, they may also want to learn how to find out whether the particular subway system has elevators.
You may be willing to lug suitcases up long flights of stairs, but I’m not.
I have two stories in relations to some previous skills listed above.
Re: How to navigate public transportation.
I had never taken a public transportation bus before I had gone to college. In college, there is no dire need for me to take the bus, but my friends and I decided our freshman year to try to learn how to use the bus system. I mean, it was so greatly advertised, why not save on gas? We look online for the arrival time, wait at the bus stop, and we see a bus coming up and stopping at the bottom of the hill. We run towards the bus, fearful of missing it only, to see it was the wrong bus and our right bus was at the top of the hill of which we had just run from. We book it and sprint up the only hill on our flat campus and fortunately made the bus. Our bus driver had a few laughs, but it was all fine and dandy. We made it to the shopping plaza, shopped, and whatnot, and that was the last time I’ve been on the bus.
Re: How to pay tolls.
I cringe when I think of this story. I was going on a road trip to meet my friends and I come up to a toll place. It’s a bit different than the ones I had seen before. It gives each person who doesn’t have a toll pass a ticket, while those who do have a toll pass just drive through. Of course, I didn’t know that information at the time…I drive up to the toll and wait for my ticket. Nothing comes out. I wait, nothing comes out. I didn’t want to drive through it because then you’d get fined, so I call my mom. I’m explaining to her what’s going on, there’s like four or five cars honking behind me, and the person in the toll building next to the plaza is waving me down, and I was stressing!
It helps to know how tolls work because goodness I didn’t know my toll pass worked at that type and based on me waiting for the ticket, I couldn’t see the screen telling me when to go.
@Pizzagirl, this was not a major impediment in the old days – I suspect I followed @JustOneDad’s approach when the female in question was not a GF and not clear what I did later. I hear from ShawSon that he wants a Queen-sized bed because he can no longer sleep with someone else in the Twin XL bed like he did in his undergraduate days. So, it is unclear that the impediment you imagine is not so great, though it may mean sleeping over more frequently at the GF’s place.
Re #174
Subways have escalators.
Uber
My mother-in-law, who is able-bodied but much older than 16, just told me that she changed her plane reservations to a much more expensive flight because her daughter would be working at the time she arrived and would be unavailable to pick her up at the airport.
A taxi ride would also likely be cheaper than changing a plane ticket for a more expensive one.