Independent Living Skills
While the independent living skills required to make it through everyday life are second nature to many, no one is merely born with all of them. For most of us, we pick up on these skills as we grow up. During our formative childhood years, we model ourselves after parents and caregivers. For some, inconsistencies delivered by their parents end up inhibiting their own abilities down the line.
The following checklist details important independent living skills that everyone should know:
- How to prepare healthy meals: nutrition information, cooking, and use of utincels
- Effective exercise and fitness: including scheduling time to stay in shape
- Household maintenance: proper cleaning and sanitary measures
- Financial preparedness: how to balance a checkbook, paying bills on time, investing, and saving
- Effective communication: getting your point across without rambling, how to use emotional language
- Workplace behavior: appropriate work attire and language
- Time management: being on time, nixing bad habits like procrastination and multitasking
- Personal Appearance and Hygiene: dress yourself, brush teeth, and can sort and machine-wash clothes
- Health: can recognize and describe symptoms of colds, flu, and other common health problems.
- Housing: can identify type of housing that is within budget and meets current housing needs.
- Transportation: ride a bike, understands seat belt, and understands public transport
- Educational Planning:Has a general idea of what education is needed for the job he/she wants
- Job Seeking Skills: know what min-wage is. can fill out a job form, and can write a resume
- Emergency and Safety Skills: knows functions of police, ambulance and fire department and how to contact them
- Knowledge of Community Resources: nearest supermarket, shopping district, laundromat, and bank is located.
- Interpersonal Skills: can identify one friend, respond to introductions and simple questions
- Legal Skills: understand the law and how to call someone if arrested or victimized
- Pregnancy Prevention/Parenting and Child Care: resources for birth control and not to leave child without supervision
These are just the basics, and while they sound simple, there’s actually a lot to learn about running your own home life, staying healthy, and developing stable relationships. For some, this might sound daunting. Not everyone grows up in a well-organized household. If parents weren’t financially stable, ate a lot of junk food or prepackaged meals, and didn’t keep the family home up very well, then it is understandable how the child they reared wouldn’t know where to start to accomplish any of those things.
Transition Response has a great checklist.
Likewise, what comes after adolescence is just as important. Study results published in the Knox News account for 6 million young people who are neither working nor attending school. The article goes on to note the detriment to society these young adults pose when they become dependent on their parents or the government due to having missed out on the window of opportunity to educate themselves.
A lot of today’s young adults are merely products of society, existing in a generation that many believe has it too easy. Pew Research states that one in four young adults in their late 20s and early 30s have moved back in with their parents after having lived independently. This points toward the growing concern that the nation’s youth are going out on their own unprepared for what life has dealt them. There is no reason to let minor details like these hold you back from getting on with your adult life.
Relying on others to take care of you won’t leave you with very much self-esteem or pride at the end of the day. When you can complete these tasks on your own — and do them well — it will have a substantially positive impact on the way you see yourself. My Central Oregon reports that 18.1 percent of the population ages 25 to 34 are living at home with their parents. One has to question how many of these young adults are doing so merely out of fear and insecurity over whether or not they can appropriately care for and support themselves.
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