The world can be a crazy and dangerous place. You probably know that now more than ever. This year has shown how volatile things can be, and why we should never take our loved ones’ safety for granted. Knowing how hectic and dangerous things can get, it’s important to teach safety.
Teaching safety may be well and good, but to truly protect our loved ones like kids, it’s important to teach real-world skills. Here are some of the top survival skills you should teach your kids from a young age.
Food prepping and storage
In the event of major calamity or disaster, one of the essential services that can be decimated is the food supply. Not getting the right amount of food is the difference between life and death, so they need to know how to make or find survival food kits to help avoid this. Survival food kits, food prep, and food storage are all incredibly useful skills that will keep them nourished even in a terrible situation.
Finding and preparing clean water
Water is the most basic of all the survival resources. Humans can last weeks without food, but they won’t last more than a few days without water, and clean water at that. Teaching them how to use iodine or boiling water to prepare it and kill bacteria, as well as following streams and foraging to find clean water, can one day save their life. Even on a simple hike, if they got lost or hurt, knowing how to find a water source can improve their chances of rescue tenfold.
Archery, marksmanship, and weaponry
Mind you, this is something you should only teach them when they are at an appropriate age and understand the gravity of safety around weapons of all classifications, but it’s important nonetheless. Teaching them how to handle themselves with weapons is good for ecological lessons on sustainable food practices such as hunting and self-defense. Kids deserve to know how to stay safe, but wait until you and they are both comfortable with this set of survival skills.
Map reading and navigation
Learning how to read maps, compasses, and even stars is an excellent way to provide your child with an invaluable lesson in navigation. Navigation skills are sorely lacking in the digital age because of our reliance on GPS. While GPS is great for convenience now, what happens when there’s no technology to rely on? Teach them how to follow tracks, read navigation tools, and determine their orientation in their surroundings, and you’ll be providing them with something that many people have lost over the years.
While you should live your life as normally as you can and enjoy each moment with your family in the day-to-day, it’s still useful to know that preparing for disasters gives you an upper hand in life. It also can’t be stressed enough that you should teach your kids and show them a healthy approach to self-reliance in the modern world.
