Much as I wish it existed, there is no single activity that can consistently teach your children valuable life skills. Sometimes kids are in a place to listen and following instruction; sometimes they’re in a place to explore and experiment; and sometimes they’re in a place to scream and smear (washable!) paint all over the walls. The truth is that every activity can offer an opportunity to not necessarily teach but to present life skills to your children. The lesson may not take hold right away, but consistent introductions of small skills will take hold and build in them over time, no lecture or PowerPoint lesson required.
Preparation
This lesson is nicely scalable. With toddlers and small children, the best way to show them the importance of preparation is to walk them through the steps as you set things up. Say you’re going to play with a sensory table full of colored water. You can involve them in the process by showing them how you fill the bucket and add the food coloring while narrating what you’re doing. “Wow, this water looks fun, but it’s also really wet and colorful. Before we play in it, we want to make sure it doesn’t get on the floors or our clothes. So we’re going to lay down some newspaper on the floor and put on our ponchos to protect our shirts. Okay, now we can have fun splashing in the water!”
For older kids, preparation can become part of their job. Parents often lament how much work and effort and prep goes into activities that their kids barely appreciate, but when your kid is excited about doing something, involve them! Maybe they’re excited to bake cookies. There are a lot of questions you can ask to get them to think through preparations before they start. “Hm, I’m excited to get started on the cookies too, but I’m not sure if we have any butter, and the beaters might be in the dishwasher. Do you know if we have all our ingredients and equipment before we start?” Help them go through the checklist, but encourage them to ask themselves the questions of what they need before they dive in.
Sharing
Oh, I so want there to be an easy fix to the problem of sharing. The one thing I will say is that kids who don’t want to share their games or toys are not going to magically forget their dragon-hoarding behavior if you don’t bring it up. So get ahead of it the next time you’re setting up an activity! Say you’re going to play a board game. Maybe try a cooperative game like Outfoxed! first if your kids tend to fight, with a goal like playing Monopoly way in the distant future. But if you’re going to play a competitive game, start it with a conversation. “I know both of you want to play as the shoe, but we only have one. What do you think we could do to make it fair?” Kids like puzzles and problem-solving. If the question isn’t “Which one do you want?” but “What does equal division look like?”, they’ll think about it more objectively. They might propose taking turns or one person getting to choose their piece and the next person getting to choose a different advantage.
If you’re doing an activity that can lead to a lot of hoarding and stealing (coloring books in our house), a nice way to remind your children that other people have feelings too is to ask, “Which crayons do you think she wants?” Sometimes kids will be dishonest and tell you the items they themselves don’t want, but then you can follow up. “Let’s ask her! Okay, she wants the red and the blue crayon. I know you said you want those too. What could we do so that everyone gets one they want?” They might propose dividing up supplies or taking turns, but if they get the opportunity to navigate the problem themselves, they usually will.
Clean-Up
I have to admit, the biggest problem I have with clean-up is that I don’t enforce it. I set up these giant activities, gallop through them in an effort to keep my kids focused, and then I release them into the wild and look around at the giant mess we’ve made. At that point I don’t really want to add “Scold and beg and enforce clean-up” to my to do list, especially when I could get things done more quickly myself.
The thing I’ve learned to do (and the lesson it’s taught me) is to make things manageable by baking in a pause in the activity and cleaning up at different stages. This is another one that’s easy with toddlers. Even if my son is very excitedly pulling out every toy car he owns to line them up on the floor, all it really takes is singing the “Clean Up” song to trigger something in his primal instincts. The clean-up moments are best used in times of transition. If you’re going to build a Lego tower and then play a game with it, a good time to pause is after you’ve built the tower but before you’ve done anything with it. “Hey, this looks really good! Now that we’ve finished with the blocks, let’s clean up the ones we’re not using. Once they’re in the box, then we can find some people and play pretend!” The promise of the next step of the activity is often enough of an incentive to make kids excited to get the cleaning out of the way quickly so they can get back to having fun.