I am trying to teach my 10 year old....daughter..... ....she....seems to get nervous at the prospect of having to actually do any of this for real.
Here's my question, what have you all taught your kids and how have you gone about doing it so they don't get scared?
My Sweetie & I raised two good kids (a son & a daughter) and I am now helping out with our daughter's three grandkids, ages 5, 7, & 10.
The grandkids had been a little over-protected before The Babysitter showed up.
That's changed.
I've introduced them to fire-making, background camping, trap-making, BB guns, atlatls, knife and axe throwing, and the fine art of eating whatever is good for you, if it isn't moving too fast.
And a lot of other stuff, from politics to astronomy. Chicken farmin', & how not to get your toes pecked.
Useful stuff.
Kids really like to learn, but they may only want to learn what
they decide they want to learn.
Take food. My daughter's a terrible cook. So she just cooks whatever's fast & easy.
There were many foods the kids simply weren't familiar with, and that made those items politically unacceptable to the absolute max.
The list of what they
didn't like was as long as my arm and included all twelve of the Five Food Groups.
"Ewww! What are these little
GREEN things?"
"They're called peas. You don't have to like them, you just have to eat them. NOW!"
Man cannot live on Mac&Cheese, Beanie Weenies, and frozen pizza. Or Shall Not, if The Babysitter hath anything to say about ith.
We've made a lot of progress, though avocados are still a problem at the moment.
(The daughter, BTW, is now actually learning how to cook. Times have changed. It is no longer optional.)
Fire-making was easy: kids are natural pyromaniacs. It was fire safety that was harder.
I use two basic strategies: if something can be made fun, I make it funnest.
If something isn't fun (like dishwashing) I teach the science of Getting It Over With Fast--the most efficient way of putting an unpleasant job squarely in the past.
Thus leaving more time to play, and getting back to playing again sooner.
As far as fear goes, most children are much more afraid of the "Unknown" than the endless lumps, bumps, thumps, and scrapes of just being a kid.
That they can cope with.
Learning a new skill can be scary if it is perceived as making "having to experience the Unknown" more probable.
Lessons become less scary if they are slanted toward make the "Unknown" perfectly ordinary.
That was probably why your daughter rose so well to the occasion during the ice storms.
A future ice storm is scary, to the uninitiated. A person's first ice storm is no longer an unknown/uncertain event. It becomes the normality of the moment when the moment arrives. Then, actually having the resources to handle it becomes a real hoot.
A joy, in fact. A positive relief: "Ain't nothin' goin' on here I can't handle."
So, between the choice of learning:
"Here's what you have you do if there's a tornado."
and
"Here's what we always do when there's a tornado."
version two usually works a lot better.
