4 essential skills kids need to learn

Kids need skills to navigate through life. And parents should be the ones to teach them.

As the parent of five adults, I'd have identified four essential skills that also happen to be the most difficult to instill: resilience, self-discipline, responsible experimentation, and self-worth.

You can teach kids to make their beds and brush their teeth. You can read to them and force them to do their homework. You can reward them for responsible behavior and allow them appropriate consequences for their actions, but peers and society take hold during their adolescent years. I was no different, frankly, and I'm a whole generation older!

To help kids navigate adolescence and adulthood, they must learn these 4 things.

Responsible experimentation: Kids want to be different from their parents. They want to forge their own path. Teach them to weigh the risk versus the benefit for whatever they want to do and to be independently wise.

Self-discipline: Sometimes it takes real inner strength to do what you know you should and not do what you know will harm you or someone else. Dig deep and find that strength. Teach kids to overcome fears as well as to stay still when they want to run wild.

Resilience: Teach kids that bad things happen. Some (if not all) of us have made choices we wish we hadn't. Some (most, in fact) will have unfair and hurtful things happen to us. We all fall down. The trick is to get back up again.

Oh, and the forth challenging yet essential thing that kids need to learn? They are worthy of love and respect. Feeling their worth make resilience and self-discipline a whole lot easier.