There is a time and a place for everything. This place is for being ready. For what you ask? No, I'm not a Doomsday Prepper getting ready for an EMP event, or giant solar flare, or some other world wide cataclysmic event. I mean being ready for a hurricane (my neck of the, er, coastal swamp of north Florida), or tornado, or LA style riots, or Paris style anarchy/riots, or losing your job, or getting lost in the woods on a hike. I think we (those of us that reside in the US of A) are going to see more social unrest over the next 5 to 10 years than we have every had before. It's not going to be pretty. It's not going to be cannibals in the streets or anything, but the more prepared you are for 'tough times' the better off you'll be when they hit. Because it will be 10 times harder to prepare when they do hit than right now.
I know, there are tons of blogs out there about prepping, across the spectrum. I visit alot of them every day, such as TEOTWAWKI Blog, and Total Survivalist Libertarian Rantfest. How am I different? I'm going to try and focus more on realistic, day to day preparedness, safety, security, and survival. Sure, I might touch on Bug Out Bags, or a cool knife, or things to do with paracord. But I'm going to try and share ideas, philosophies, and skills, and learn some new stuff myself, rather than audition for Doomsday Preppers.
So first off, lets tackle the skills versus stuff question. I definitely fall on the skills side of the question. I truly believe that a good foundation of skills, and even more importantly the basic ability to FIGURE IT OUT (or 'MacGyver it'), is the most important quality anyone can have. The only thing you are guaranteed to have with you in any situation is your brain. Plus cool tools cost money, don't always last, and you may not have them handy when you need them.
So how do you make the most of your brain power? I think it starts very early with what you play with as a kid, and how you play. I'm deeply worried about the Xbox generations we are raising. Using your imagination as a kid and creating fun toys and environments just using hte stuff you find laying around trains your brain to see the possibilities in every item. Rocks and sticks become tanks and cars, forts and swords. Sticks can be constructed into buildings and other tools. Any kid that has built a little fort in the bushes for themselves in the backyard out of sticks and newspaper (another disappearing item that has many uses!) and an old tarp, is way ahead of most people if they ever have to build a shelter in the wilderness to get out of the elements and survive.
I think Legos were a huge factor in my MacGyver quotient. Days of taking a bunch of rectangle bricks and making a house, a car, a spaceship, or a castle taught me very valuable thinking skills. (I grew up in the 70s and 80s, when Legos were just that, rectangles, rather than the custom part for every need nowadays.) Planning is the most important step of any MacGyver situation. You probably have limited resources, so it doesn't help your situation to use them up with trial and error. Planning in these situations starts with envisioning, and listing, the qualities or specifications you are trying to achieve ('Know where you are going'). The next step is collecting and analyzing your resources. But the key here is to not just see what it is (a coat hanger, for instance) but what it can be (wire, hole punch, hook, supporting element, spear tip, framing element, spring). I call this 'What am I going to use?'. Finally its 'How am I going to get there?' How can I use these tools and resources to accomplish my goals. Kids do that in terms of 'How can I have fun?' which is good, because then they have fun and they keep doing it and practicing. As an adult in a 'situation', whatever that might be, you need to be more practical. But it is still fun when you can say 'I made a tool out of that coat hanger that accomplished this task, saving me a trip to Home Depot and at least $30!'
Some useful skills that are multipliers in the MacGyver quotient are: knot tying, sewing, knife skills (whittling), and basic engineering (forces, levers, counterbalancing, load paths).
What could you build if you had a knife, using sticks and vines and bark and branches and anything else you could find in the woods? A shelter, a litter, a cooking teepee (to hang a pot from), a chair, a bed, a paddle, a tray, a bucket, a crude seine or net, a spear, atlatl or other weapon, a sling, a fire?
So overall, I think it is very important to raise your kids as makers, imaginative creators, who can create their own toys and play spaces using simple 'ingredients'. Those thought processes will serve them well in any situation, including school. They will know how to THINK, use LOGIC, and FIGURE THINGS OUT. That is the most important thing anyone can know.
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