Preparing Your Teens for Life as Adult With These 4 Ingenious Life Hacks

Unless you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, as the old saying goes, you were probably raised learning more life hacks than you can count on all your fingers and toes. However, back in the day, they weren’t called life hacks. They were simply known as “making do with what you’ve got to work with.” Doesn’t it seem like today, kids are altogether too willing to dispose of something that is torn or broken because it’s too easy to just buy another one. As parents, we lovingly oblige.

However, is that really preparing them for life as an adult out there in the real world? Probably not. Why not start right now, today, teaching them some life hacks to help them live more responsibly while also getting them to think about finding a few for themselves. It can actually be fun if you approach it right. Now, let’s get on to those 4 life hacks you may want to start with.

1. Layout Everything for the Next Day Before Bed

How many times have your kids been late for school because they missed the bus or the carpool ride? Why? It’s because they couldn’t find their homework they so diligently worked on (not!) or their athletic shoes for football practice after school. If they learn to lay them out the night before, they wouldn’t have this problem, would they? If this is a common issue of rush in the morning to the stress of everyone in the household, it’s a life hack they can surely use!

2. Put Your Alarm Away From Reach

Even adults fall prey to this! How many times each morning do you hit the snooze button for that extra 5 or 10 minutes before being ‘forced’ out of bed? If they put the alarm where they can’t reach it, they will get up to turn it off, making it easier to stay up since they are already up.

3. Do Away With the Blame Game

Kids can fall into fits of depression because they continually blame themselves for anything and everything that goes wrong in their lives. We find ourselves doing that too, don’t we? This is something that many foster parents have had to explain to the kids in their care. “Honey, it’s not anything you did. Your parents love you, they are just facing issues they can’t deal with at the moment. It’s nothing you did.”

Quite often the social worker from fostering agencies like fosteringpeople.co.uk, will be able to share with you the background of a teen and why they’ve grown up blaming themselves for the breakup of the family. This is more common than you realise, and it may be something that they will need counselling for. In any case, other teens who have gone through this very thing suggest that the best life hack of all is to work on knowing that sometimes there is no blame. It’s just the way events unfold.

4. If at First You Don’t Succeed…

This is another thing so many kids need to learn. They get discouraged altogether too easily. Explain that they can use this as a learning experience. If you didn’t get it right the first time, try again another way. This can be one of the most useful lifehacks when out there in the real world. So many entrepreneurs are multi-millionaires today because they stuck it out. When their products weren’t selling, they redesigned them or brought out a new product line. You can’t accept failure just because the first attempt went awry.

Closing With a Life Hack to Live By – Let Positivity Rule

Finally, let’s teach kids to look at life with positivity. They CAN do this because they have it within themselves to succeed. It’s about finding their place in life and what works for THEM. Wake up each day knowing you can conquer whatever you set out to do and watch things fall naturally into place. But if you reach a stumbling block, remember hack #4. If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.