If you are a mother to teenagers who are soon to fly the nest, you might be beginning to feel a little anxious about how they’ll survive in the big, wide world. While we have all left home and found our way perfectly fine, as a mother, it can be daunting to imagine your teens navigating adulthood, can’t it?
Approaching the point when your teens will leave home and go off to college is a hard challenge, but as a mother, one of the easiest ways to alleviate this anxiety is to teach them valuable life lessons. The more you equip your kids with tools to be self sufficient, the better you’ll sleep once they are gone.
Here are three life lessons you should teach your teenagers!
1. Life Costs Money – Fact
One of the hard truths you have to learn when you leave home is that life costs a lot of money. Most teenagers are used to managing micro-amounts of money, either earned from their part time jobs or given as an allowance from their parents.
However, when teenagers leave home and go off to college or start a full time job, they will be responsible for managing more money than before. If they want to be responsible adults, they need to learn how to budget and manage their money efficiently, so they don’t end up hitting the bottom of their bank accounts too soon.
Being an adult is full of unexpected costs – you wake up one morning and realize you’ve got to call Plumbers before the new sink leak turns into a flood; your power goes out and an electrician is needed; you get a flat tire and have to call your breakdown provider… The list goes on. Teaching your teenagers to save and manage their money carefully is an invaluable lesson for them to learn.
2.Nutrition Is More Important Than You Thi
Teaching teenagers to cook healthy, cost-effective meals might be a laborious task, but it will reward them time and again as they get older. Nutrition is a crucial element that not only allows you to feel better and more energized, but means that a young person will be instilling good eating habits as they get older.
Your teenagers might be able to stay skinny on fast food now, but teaching them good nutrition will mean they can practice these healthy eating routines as they age and become less invincible!
3. No Feeling Is Final
Now for an emotional lesson: no feeling is final. Young people feel things super intensely, because so many things are “firsts” – their first love, their first breakup, their first feeling of failure, or their first feeling of major success! The lesson that no feeling is final lets us be grateful for what we are experiencing in the moment, even if it is a bad feeling. Everything can be a lesson if you appreciate that nothing ever remains the same. A valuable lesson for youngsters, to say the least!
Life lessons are learned along the way, but as mothers, it’s our job to teach some of them!
