Life Skills class for high school

Y’all my kids are growing up. I don’t know if you’re aware, but that happens, and we’ve been confronted with the realization we have finite time to get our kids ready for the real world. One of the final pieces of the puzzle we wanted them to have was financial skills. So I set out to research different finance classes and life skills classes. Not too surprisingly there are a lot of them out there, and a lot of them are junk. No, seriously, I’m not really going to trust that finance and life skills class taught by the credit card company. Shocker, I know. Finally I found one from LYFT Learning, Life Skills Reimagined. I voluntold my kids it was time to start learning skills.

(This post is sponsored by Life Skills Reimagined, and there are quite probably affiliate links in here)

Why do our kids need life skills classes?

I’m sure I’m telling you really obvious stuff, but the number of young adults who crash and burn because they missed out on vital skills is staggeringly high.

The number of 20-somethings with staggering debt because they weren’t taught how to manage money and how to balance a budget is scary.

A friend of mine in her mid-20s told me she has several friends who are up to their eyeballs in credit card debt because they got to college and every company was more than happy to give her a credit card and she financed her life on those cards.

I had a college roommate who paid for one of her college semesters with a credit card.

Many of Jeff’s and my parenting choices are from our mistakes or our friends’ mistakes we don’t want our kids to make.

We want our kids to leave our house with the knowledge of how to survive, or as the popular hashtag says “adulting.”*

What you learn in Life Skills Reimagined

I’m going to quote straight from their website here, there are five main topics (now full disclosure, my kids are still taking this, so they are mostly in the first unit, communication skills)

1. Communication
2. Getting and Keeping a Job
3. Personal Finance
4. Resiliency
5. Independent Living

Each unit is broken down into further sub-categories to work through, and I have to be honest I’m not as excited by the communication unit because they’ve covered that a lot in other classes, but I love the Independent Living and Personal Finance units. Those are the two particular units I wanted in a life skills class.

It’s been over 20 years since I really had to think about setting up an apartment and all of the odds and ends needed to get that started. Going back to that 20-something friend, she was talking about moving into her first apartment and realizing she would need to set up internet, electricity, and all of these things and she wasn’t sure how to do that.

Thoughts on Life Skills Reimagined

Okay, there are a few things you should know:

1. My daughter is super interested in psychology and therapy, so the first unit was rather basic for her
2. My kids all took an “intro to college” class which did a lot of “how to interact with people” lessons

Those two things really colored how my kids saw the class going into it. When the first unit is material you’ve already learned before, it’s not going to be your favorite material.

Then it falls prey to the classic blunder.

They tried to be cool.

I’ve gotten quite a few texts from my daughter mocking certain lessons when they try to make jokes or share memes.

There isn’t a complaint about the material, they just complain about the occasional silliness as it tries to be cool.

But getting to what I as the mom think about it.

I really like the topics covered. This is a unit my kids haven’t covered yet, but look at the topics covered. All very important information to work through, and concepts to think about. While many of these are topics we’ve covered in theory (price comparison), but we haven’t covered it in a systematic approach.

This goes through it all in a nice plan, you’re less likely to leave it out if it’s all in a nice organized plan.

The lessons use a combination of different ways to present the materials and each unit reviews the materials, tests for mastery, and then gives next steps.

I really like the next steps component.

More High School content

• Finding your teen’s motivations and career exploration
• High School Chemistry
• Homeschool High School by Design review
• Middle Ages High School Reading List
• 9th-grade books made into movies

It is okay if you have your kids take classes they don’t love

My kids don’t rave about this class. There have been some materials they’ve loved, but they also admit the materials are useful to know for life.

That is okay.

None of my kids loved their driver’s ed class. They made fun of the “man on the street” videos with people getting obvious answers wrong.

But they were glad they took the material because it made passing the driver’s test and getting ready to drive so much better.

That’s the thing about life, not everything is fun, and not everything will be your first choice.

It’s good to learn that now.

Not at 25 years old.

Cool facts about this course, that may matter to you

My big thing was did it teach the materials I needed to be covered? But there are some cool other things I learned about as I was writing this post:

• there is a mobile version (my kids all complete their lessons on their computers)!
• It’s driven by science: Check out the bottom of their about page for research
• There are accessibility adaptations (like completely narrated videos), super cool
• They have extra help for Spanish ESL

And this isn’t one of their cool points towards the course, but the belief behind the company. I LOVE their mission statement:

That is one of my goals for my children, for them to be good stewards of the gifts they’ve been given.

Get your own copy of Life Skills Reimagined

The Life Skills Reimagined course is $60 for the equivalent of 1 year of high school credit. That’s more or less comparable to all the other high school curricula I’ve gotten for my kids.

*I find the adulting hashtag hilarious, and would probably use it ironically.