Key Takeaways
• Kids today may lack traditional life skills, but they're learning new ones that reflect the digital age.
• Social and communication skills are essential for kids to practice, even in a tech-driven world.
• Parents can help kids build independence by teaching practical skills like money management and problem-solving without the help of a cellphone.
My kids used to have a babysitter who couldn't read an analog clock.
A 19-year-old college student, she was smart, thoughtful, and quick. But if she ever happened to look at the round clock hanging in my living room, the position of the big and little hands meant nothing to her. When she told me so, I simply couldn't believe it.
"That's something they teach to six-year-olds!" I remember telling a friend. "Has she never watched the second hand in anticipation of a boring class ending? Is a clock tower just a funny, tall building to her? How could she have gotten this far in life without reading an analog clock?"
It seems a lot of parents are asking the same thing. I recently talked to a woman in line at the DMV who said she realized her 20-something son can't read a map. A friend said her company's newest intern admitted she can't cook even the simplest meals. And I recently came across a Reddit post where someone complained about young people not knowing table manners.
Young people, it seems, are lacking in basic life skills.
Laurie Kopp Weingarten, President & Chief Educational Officer at One-Stop College Counseling, who works with high school students to help them navigate the college admission process, says that in many cases, it's not that parents and schools aren't effectively teaching today's young people. It's just that they're busy teaching different lessons.
In order to make time for lessons in coding, robotics, and video editing—all skills that some schools have deemed essential in the digital age—there often isn't time for cursive or typing.
"[Young people today] are certainly learning skills that I never had the opportunity to learn. We didn't even have the technology when I was growing up to do any of these things," says Kopp Weingarten. "You lose some skills and you gain others."
Nina Yevdash, a public school teacher in Chicago who has worked with kindergarten through sixth graders, says that it's not uncommon for class curricula to change with the times.
She recalls how, when she was in college, one of her professors spent almost an entire semester teaching the class how to do running records, an assessment tool used to track a student's reading. When a student reads a passage, the teacher or tutor marks over the printed word to indicate what they read correctly or incorrectly. "This professor kept telling us that this is a skill we were going to need to know how to do very well. And to this day, I have never had to use a paper-and-pencil running record in my professional career, because now there's technology for that," says Yevdash.
Perhaps map reading is the running record of today for millennial parents and their kids. Perhaps there are things young people haven't learned because they haven't needed to—while it might seem essential to other generations to know how to read an analog clock, kids with phones in their pockets wouldn't say the same.
And yet, maybe some skills still have value. Here are the skills educators have noticed today's young people commonly aren't getting, so you can decide for your kids.
People Skills and Communication
Communication is an essential professional and personal skill, but educators say many students struggle with it.
"Probably the biggest thing I'm seeing [in young people] is the lack of communication skills or the lack of confidence speaking to others," Kopp Weingarten says.
She says she noticed a shift in kids' social skills around the pandemic, but the emergence of screens and technology have played a big role as well. Kopp Weingarten sees a lot of students who are noticeably uncomfortable speaking to adults and even other kids face to face. That makes sense for kids who have grown up texting more than talking on the phone, and communicating via Snapchat and Zoom videos.
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Elle DecorTravel+Leisure "I've often seen kids texting people in the same room instead of talking to them. It happens a lot," she says.
Melissa Tsuei, an educational consultant and early childhood special educator outside of Philadelphia, says it's easier for the younger generations to avoid social situations, and practicing can be awkward. But it's still an important skill she hopes people will work on.
"Social interaction is very complex. It has so many components that kids need to learn over time. And they have to learn it through missteps and mistakes and being able to repair and come back to a relationship," Tsuei says.
Of course, these lessons were much easier for kids to learn when they were forced to communicate face to face rather than through a device.
Reading Maps and Analog Clocks
Many kids today don't know how to read an analog clock or a traditional map, says Kopp Weingarten, and it's no wonder why. She says that for kids who have grown up knowing everyone has a phone with both a digital clock and GPS in their pocket, both map and analog clock skills may seem pointless to them.
Curby Alexander, an associate professor of education at Texas Christian University, points out that telling and writing time from an analog clock is still listed as a Common Core standard for first graders, so they should be learning these skills in school. But practicing and remembering how to use an analog clock may be another story—in other words, the skill may atrophy over time if it's not used.
Many students may not even have an analog clock in their home, and some schools have even switched to digital clocks.
"In situations like this, causation is hard to pin down," says Alexander. "Did students' lack of ability to read analog clocks force schools to make a change, or did the schools just catch up to society, which has largely abandoned putting analog clocks in public spaces?"
The same argument could be made about reading a map, says Alexander.
"Technological advances have changed the way we interact with print and location. GPS technology simply requires us to plug in an address, and the app's algorithms will get us where we need to go, turn by turn," he says.
The downside is that if this technology ever fails, becomes outdated, or isn't available for some reason, young people today who grew up using it will find their world becomes less accessible to them.
Cursive
Just like reading an analog clock and using a map, reading and writing in cursive has proven, for many young people, unnecessary.
"The prevalence of digital text means we are spending a lot more time typing on keyboards or phones rather than writing things by hand," says Alexander. "As more schools have students complete assignments on computers and upload them to digital course management systems like Canvas or Google Classroom, the amount of typing a student does will far outweigh the time they spend writing things by hand."
That explains why Common Core State Standards, which were adopted in 2010, removed the requirement for cursive. However, many states have brought cursive requirements back to the classroom, with 27 states now mandating cursive instruction.
Writing a Letter
In a world of phone, email, text, instant message, DM, and voice-to-text, letter-writing is one of the slowest ways to get information to someone—and people these days are used to speed and convenience.
Kopp Weingarten shared an anecdote of a college student who had to call his dad to ask how to mail a letter.
"The father said, you have to get a stamp. So the son texted his father a picture of return address labels and asked, 'Is this a stamp?'" Kopp Weingarten recalls. "Finally, the son found the stamps but didn't know which side of the envelope to put it on. It's funny because the student is so smart, and so capable in many ways. But he just never needed to mail a letter."
Letter writing, while not as popular as it once was, has some upsides to it: It forces kids to not rush, think hard about what they want to say, and be more intentional about who they are sending it to and why, because they actually have to find a stamp and mailbox before the message is delivered.
Spelling and Writing
Kopp Weingarten isn't that worried if young people aren't writing many letters. But she is concerned about their broader writing and spelling skills.
"Kids aren't writing well," says Kopp Weingarten. "They're so used to texting that they write with incorrect grammar, incorrect punctuation. I'll see lowercase I's. I see 'high school' written as one word all the time," she says.
She says she knows these students are learning the basics of spelling and grammar, but when the majority of their communication takes place via text or on social media, they get accustomed to a less formal style, and eventually, they might forget what is correct.
Automatic spell check in both Word documents and even on messaging platforms doesn't help matters, giving teens who are still learning spelling and grammar the right answer without them having to learn it.
Writing a Check
Writing checks has gotten less and less common thanks to the prominence of online bill pay and the ease of paying with a card or via app (like Venmo). Writing a check is often unnecessary.
Tsuei says that this might not seem problematic, but she worries about kids growing up thinking of money as an invisible object on an app with no numbers attached—writing a check, or paying with cash for that matter, makes money feel concrete and tangible.
She's also concerned they might not learn the basics of finances and banking—a skill that, as kids get older, she says, is necessary. After all, there was a time when our parents taught us to balance a checkbook, which is probably far less common now.
She says this is a lesson she hopes parents will take on. Of course, very young children won't understand complex financial lessons. But parents could make a lesson out of going on a trip to the bank, or with very young children, Tsuei recommends pretend play, such as acting out buying toys from a store.
There are also debit cards designed specifically for teens that you use to teach your older child financial responsibility, as well as savings accounts you can open together.
She says that, when it comes to a lesson that's as abstract as finance, you have to get on a kid's level and explain why it's important in a way they understand.
"Because, you know, kids don't have the same priorities that we have," Tsuei says.
Ability to Focus
Tsuei says she sees a lot of educators report issues with younger children's attention spans.
"When kids are coming into kindergarten, many have a hard time regulating their own bodies and being able to stay still and focus," Tsuei explains. "Of course, that impacts what skills they can pick up because you need to be able to attend to something in order to learn it."
She says part of the problem is screen time, in which quick-moving images condition the brain to expect fast-paced content. But she also thinks kids have a hard time in a classroom because their parents are so actively engaging at home.
"There was a whole swing in parenting that focused on engagement with children, which was a very positive thing overall," Tsuei says. "But I think the pendulum kind of swung too far at one point, and we ended up having parents who were really trying to engage their children almost all of their waking hours."
She says kids need time for child-led play so they can do their own learning and developing, without intrusion from a teacher or parent.
Maybe it seems counterintuitive, she says, but sometimes focusing less on skill-building and more on how to play, problem solve, and live in the world independently are the best lessons kids can get.
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