<p>Anna (not her real name) is a freshman at a college thats an 8-hour drive from home. Last week she called her mother, my friend Judy, to report that she was feeling achy and chilled and thought that she might be coming down with a cold, maybe even the flu. Her friends had offered her Tylenol but, she confided to her mom, "I don't know how to take a pill."</p>
<p>Judy explained to me that Anna has always been such a healthy child that she rarely needed medications. In addition, the family is one that favors natural remedies over pharmaceuticals. So somehow Anna had managed to make it to age 18 without ever learning how to swallow a tablet of Tylenol. "I guess I screwed up on that one!" Judy confided. </p>
<p>With my own son's freshman fall now just two years away, Judy's predicament makes me wonder what I've neglected to teach him. He's got the pill thing down (so to speak); he can operate a washer and dryer and sew on a button, albeit clumsily (same with me). He has mastered basic cooking and can navigate an airport and read a map. But what else am I missing that he ought to know before he leaves home?</p>
<p>I call on experienced parents of collegians to tell me about your own oversights, so that I won't end up like Judy, with a kid 400 miles away who hasn't learned some essential life skill.</p>
<p>My daughter did not know that different sized envelopes (different weights, actually) require different amounts of postage. Dropped her internship applications in 8x11 envelopes into the mail with one “Forever” stamp on them. Most routed back to my house with postage due, as she put her home address as the return address.</p>
<p>intparent … LOL! That’s a perfect example of EXACTLY what I was talking about. There are some things we just assume our kids must know, but they may not. I’m going to go ask my son right now what he would do if he had to mail an 8 x11 envelope.</p>
<p>How to clean a bathroom! Son’s dorm has two double rooms, each with a sink in it, that share a bathroom, with a toilet and shower. We did not realize the boys would be responsible for cleaning it themselves. I have tried to suggest they make a Target run for cleaning supplies. Not surprisingly, he’s not interested. I just cannot imagine how gross this is going to get. I wish I had insisted he clean his bathroom at home, at least this past summer. He has been doing his own laundry, making his bed, etc., but has never cleaned a bathroom!</p>
<p>As we were going through the application process there was a question that needed to be asked of an admissions office. No, you can not email, you’ll have to make a real live phone call to a stranger. We went over the question, my son wrote notes, and I handed him the phone number. A few minutes later he came back and said “this number doesn’t work”. It was then I realized he’d never made a long distance call that wasn’t programmed into his cellphone. He was using a landline and didn’t know to dial “1” before the area code. Certainly not life altering, but it struck me as something we take for granted, like proper postage.</p>
<p>rockvillemom’s comment about bathroom cleaning reminded me of something. I once read a piece by an investigative reporter who spent a month as a minimum wage earner, to find out what that would really be like. Her minimum wage job was as a house cleaner for one of those maid service firms. She was grossed out by some of the bathrooms in the homes she cleaned, especially bathrooms of kids. But it made her realize that her own two teenage sons had never in their lives cleaned a toilet. They’d always had a cleaner at their house. Since the boys were sharing her cheap apartment (she did the complete minimum wage lifestyle) she put them in charge of cleaning the bathroom immediately.</p>
<p>Indeed, everyone should know how to do basic house cleaning. When there’s no stay-at-home parent, however, the use of a cleaning person or service is common, naturally, and it’s easy for the parent(s) to overlook the fact that their kids are growing up with no experience of housework at all.</p>
<p>We had a family list of things to learn before age 18:
How to wash clothes
How to sew a button
How to check oil
How to change a tire
How to write a check, use financial software, check bank account
How to read a map
How to write a resume
How to write a professional letter
How to clean a bathroom
How to mop a floor
How to clean a carpet spill
How to operate a fire extinguisher
How to iron a shirt</p>
<p>Ditto on Blueiguana’s post about calling long distance. It may be partially because where we live you have to dial the area code for local numbers, but not the “1”. So when dialing a different area code, my son also didn’t know to dial “1” first.</p>
<p>Remind them to put their name on bags!!! My DS left his on a train when going back to school and never got it back. I asked him if his name was on it, and he said “no” because he was carrying it with him, so why would he need his name on it (sigh).</p>
<p>How to ride a bike. This seems like something everyone learns as a kid. My DS uses his bike a lot at school to get to classes across campus. He has a friend who doesn’t know how to ride. I just talked to a neighbor who’s daughter also wants a bike for school but doesn’t know how to ride one.</p>
<p>And on a humorous note: how to keep in touch with the parents! Some kids seem to forget that the people paying the tuition would like to hear from them once in awhile to find out how they are doing!!! :)</p>
<p>You know, I was never formally taught how to clean a bathroom or iron a shirt or read a map-but I figured it all out fast enough. And I probably developed my own quirks in the process, procedures that work for me but might not for the next person. Good heavens. These kids managed to get into college, they can pick up this stuff on their own, and if they are truly stumped, there is literally nothing you can’t learn from the internet. (Just googled “best way to clean bathroom” and “how to iron a shirt” and got tons of useful results.) Not rocket science, as they say.</p>
<p>I’d like to have spent more time going over financial matters with him. Or maybe I just wish he’d taken immediately to my advice to do things like save 10% of every check, for instance. But he’s going to learn as he goes, I guess. We did discuss loans and credit cards and he knows how to do his basic banking.</p>
<p>It wasn’t until he did his graduation gift thank you cards that i learned he didn’t know that in addition to the address, envelopes require the name of the recipient. Luckily I caught it and he added the names after :)</p>
<p>I don’t know how to do any of those things…</p>
<p>I only learned how to mop because I had to at my first job. </p>
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<p>I don’t know how to ride a bike either. When I was little everyone rode skateboards instead, so I know (or atleast knew… it’s been a while since I’ve done it) how to ride a skateboard, but never a bike.</p>
<p>well, here’s one I thought we had gone over, but no. How to take money out of an ATM. She just got her own account this summer even though she has had jobs before, I ran her checks through my account. I thought we were ok with this one, until she called and said she was running out of cash. She had kept cash out from gifts but deposited most into the on campus bank. I said, well go to the ATM. She said “I’m scared I’ll mess up”. I told her to go tomorrow to the one on campus in the bank branch while it is open - and to holler for help if anything went wrong.</p>
<p>Don’t worry, I discovered last year that our mail person at work didn’t know that either. (We got stuff returned).</p>
<p>The first time I wrote a check, I didn’t fill in the part where you write out the number. I just managed to overlook that line.</p>
<p>The ATM story made me remember when I first got a debit card – you know how they auto-assign a pin? I didn’t change it for some reason and failed to memorize it well – I locked myself out of an ATM more than once with too many wrong guesses. Eventually I did manage to change the pin to something I’d remember.</p>
<p>I still occasionally call my parents with “I don’t know how to” stories, though, and I’m 25. The last time was when my cat caught (and failed to kill) a mouse. I called my father and said “I have a mouse in a plastic bag and I don’t want to be cruel and kill it, but I don’t want it back in my apartment…what do I do?”</p>
<p>This week my son has been asking me how to make pie crust when you have no access to shortening, but I don’t think that’s an essential life skill even though he does. :)</p>
<p>I sympathize with OP’s friend - my 18 year old freshman daughter cannot swallow a pill. I have been giving her melt in the mouth or chewables her entire life. Sent her to college with tylenol and benadryl in those forms. We have tried many times to “teach” her but she just can’t seem to do it!</p>
<p>Not going to lie, I have to google every time I want to send something bigger than a standard, small envelopes to figure out postage. I want to blame it on the technology generation, but my 49 year old father can’t figure it out either :o</p>
Most routed back to my house with postage due, as she put her home address as the return address.</p>