Planting Herbs Boosts Learning and Cooking Skills

Building life skills in your kids is very important – some might say more important than building academic skills. After all, if your child can’t cook for him or herself, they’re in for a rough time of it in their older years. We’ve actually found one of the best ways to teach cooking is to grow our own herbs. We plant thyme, oregano, cilantro, dill and quite a few others. Not only does it boost our sons’ cooking skills, but it also helps them learn more about plants, gardening and even a bit of history and science about plants. (when we venture into where those herbs we use originally came from).

Pocketknives – The Dreaded Question

In almost every little boy’s life there will come a day when he asks, “Mom, dad, can I have a pocketknife?” If you’re anything like me, my first instinct was to say, “When you’re 18.” That’s not what happened, though. We put our sons in Boy Scouts, where they learned knife safety, the right ways to hold and carry a knife and the importance of proper care. Of course, we don’t let them use their knives unsupervised (not even the seventh grader), but I really think that owning a knife (after proper training) is a way to introduce greater responsibility and build a feeling of independence in our kids.