Life Skills Kids Wish Their Parents Taught Them Before College

This is a complaint I’ve heard from parents for years… So much of our kids’ education is focused on academics, preparing for college, and getting them ready for the workforce.

Somewhere in between the tests and all of the extracurricular activities we felt they needed, we forgot to teach them the everyday skills they’ll need to actually live on their own.

For the first time, they’re managing their own money, making appointments, doing laundry and cooking their own meals.

This means that the last summer we have with them before college starts needs to be focused on not only bonding with them and making memories but also developing some basic life skills to use in their next chapter.

These are the seven basic life skills that I encourage every parent to teach their child before college!

Managing Money

This skill is arguably the most important skill on my list.

I know adults that still can’t manage their own money successfully.

It’s a skill that is really hard to learn unless the situation is sink or swim.

Our teenagers get their first jobs and suddenly feel like they have hit the lottery. Every bit of it is treated as spending money.

As college students, our kids are budgeting for gas, buying their own food, and trying to find a way to afford to go out to events with friends.

Teach your kids what a budget looks like, how to take out the necessities and then figure out a way to live the life they want with what’s left over.

You’d be surprised the amount of college students that don’t know the difference between a debit vs. credit card.

Credit card companies are often on college campuses offering credit to students that have never had to budget in their lives.

By the end of their college careers, these college students may be six figures into student loan debt and have five figures of credit card debt.

Luckily, we can teach our kids how to be careful with their finances and spending so they are managing their money instead of letting their money manage them.

Doing Laundry the Right Way

Chances are, you have been doing laundry for your entire family for nearly two decades.

In my experience, it was so much easier to just do it myself.

It took just one instance of having to buy a replacement soccer jersey for me to learn my lesson that teenagers just aren’t naturally great at doing laundry.

Fortunately for you and unfortunately for them, sending your kid off to college means sending off the laundry responsibilities too.

Before move-in day, make sure your child knows the importance of sorting their laundry (or at the very least, buy them come color catching sheets) and teach them to read the care instruction labels on their clothes.

The easiest way to teach your soon-to-be college student how to do laundry is to simply stop doing it for them.

Have them join you in sorting their laundry, show them step-by-step what you do and why, and teach them the importance of respecting the dryer so it doesn’t shrink all of their clothes!

Cooking a Few Real Meals

I went into (probably way too much) detail in this post about the simple meals I think every college student should know how to make before leaving home.

You don’t need to teach your child how to make complicated meals or how to feed an entire family.

The goal is to simply make sure they can confidently feed themselves now that you won’t be there to do it for them.

Use this as a bonding experience and cook together throughout their last summer at home.

Ask them to make dinner for the family once or twice a week.

Be careful not to help too much. Have your child do everything from planning to shopping to making the meal…and don’t forget to have them clean up afterward!

This skill is one they’ll carry with them for the rest of their lives, and they will thank you when they can make some of their favorite foods with minimal tools in a dorm room!

Managing Their Own Health

Yes, I’m considering managing their own health to be a life skill!

Chances are, your child has never booked their own doctor’s appointment before and they probably have no idea where their insurance card is.

These are a few basic skills you can teach them quickly that are so important before they move out.

Make sure your child knows how to refill their own prescriptions.

This is such a simple thing to overlook, but simply taking your son or daughter with you on your next pharmacy run will make this task seem less intimidating when they have to do it themselves.

I would also make sure your child actually knows their own medical history.

This may sound ridiculous at first glance, but so many kids were super young when they had a surgery and they may complete forget they had their tonsils removed.

They may be so used to avoiding certain foods that they forget to mention an allergy when someone asks.

Ensuring your child knows their own medical history, allergies, and any condition that you have always managed for them is vital now that they’re going to be living on their own.

I made sure my kids had a picture of their insurance card on their phones, just in case they ever needed it.

Time Management (and Waking Themselves Up)

Your child may be used to waking up early for high school and having every moment of their lives scheduled for them.

It seems like it would be a seamless transition to waking up early for college classes.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the case.

You won’t be there to use an increasingly annoyed voice as they ask for “5 more minutes” for the 20th time.

One of the things we bought for each of our kids before they went to college was a physical alarm clock.

I talk about this in detail in our “Things You’ll Need for Your College Dorm Room” post…

An alarm clock on a cell phone is great, but is also a recipe for disaster.

It’s way too easy to hit snooze and miss an important class or deadline.

Teach your child to keep an alarm clock across the room so they have to physically get up to turn it off.

Start this BEFORE they head off to college!

When your child needs to wake up for work the summer before they move out, make them responsible for waking up and getting to work on time.

Let them keep track of their own calendar for the summer.

I taught my kids how to set reminders in their phone calendars and the importance of having an old-fashioned planner for backup.

We need to teach them to manage their own time responsibly so this is less of a shock when they’re on their own.

Speaking Up for Themselves

I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times…I am a recovering people pleaser. It has always been so important to me to teach my kids to speak up for themselves.

College is the first chapter in their lives where my husband and I won’t be there to make sure our kids are being fair to themselves in hard situations.

You should take this to heart as well.

Make sure your children are comfortable emailing professors to question a grade, asking questions when they don’t understand an assignment, and going to office hours when they need extra help.

They also need to be able to handle minor conflicts in their personal lives.

Roommate conflicts and disagreements with friends are uncomfortable, but learning to handle them is part of life.

We won’t always be there to tell our kids what to say or reassure them that they’re doing the right thing.

Before they leave home, they should be comfortable standing up for themselves, setting boundaries, and pausing to think before they speak.

Of course you can still offer your advice; that’s the role of a parent…no matter how old they get!

But now it’s time for you to step back and become more of a sounding board than a problem solver.

Handling ‘Adult’ Paperwork

When we were enrolling our kids in college, I was kind of surprised by the amount of paperwork that I, as a parent, had to fill out.

Even though our kids were 18, we were still signing off on so much.

Suddenly, they’re going to be at college having to handle adult paperwork for themselves, and most kids will have no idea what to do.

My best advice is to include your child in all of the paperwork that you have to fill out during the college admissions process.

Show them how you’re reading the fine print, questioning what it says, and getting clarity BEFORE you sign anything.

Now is also a great time to show your adult children how to keep their documents organized.

Each of our children has a fireproof lockbox in their dorm rooms for safe keeping.

We both know that as adults, we’re constantly handed forms and documents we don’t completely understand.

You can never completely prepare your children for every piece of paperwork they’ll encounter.

The key here is to make sure they know that just because someone is insisting they sign something, it doesn’t mean they’re required to sign without understanding what they’re agreeing to.

Just teach them to pause, actually read what’s in front of them, and then put their important documents somewhere safe.

A Simple Summer-Before-College Practice Plan

While this may seem like a lot, none of these skills take much time to teach at all.

Most of what we’ve covered in this list are solved with a simple conversation with your child.

Just start handing responsibility over to your child intentionally. Maybe one task per week, until they move out.

If you’re at a doctor appointment, have them read the paperwork and schedule their next appointment.

Have them start doing their own laundry, preparing a meal or two a week, and teach them little by little to manage their own money.

No one has every skill necessary for adulthood mastered when they move into their dorm.

Ideally, we’d just like our kids to not be completely caught off guard when they suddenly realize that they’re on their own with the daily life of being an adult.

You Don’t Have to Teach Them Everything

You’ll see that this transition into adulthood is a lot more seamless than you’d expect, and you’re a bigger part of it than you’d think.

Your child is still going to call and text you for advice as things come up.

That’s okay, and is the sign of them figuring things out on their own.

Chances are, you are their most trusted advisor. What an honor that is.

You’ve raised your children to this point to learn how to figure things out, not to automatically know exactly what to do in every situation.

When they aren’t sure what to do next, your college student can still call home and you can figure it out together.

I’d say that’s a sign that we did a pretty good job raising kids who are ready to stand on their own two feet.