Are teens taught enough life skills to know how to 'adult'?

Australia Broadcast Center

a day ago

Mai is a first-year medical student. She also doesn't know how to change a light bulb.
After her 18th birthday she moved out of her home in Shepparton, Victoria, to go to university in Armidale, New South Wales.
"The whole move out was a bit stressful," she says.
"I feel like I was a bit independent, but there was just this big sudden change where now I'm cooking for myself. I'm cleaning for myself. I am transporting myself everywhere. I'm flying on planes alone.
"I'm doing this, I'm doing that and they seem like small things, but once you add having to study on top of that, it just all becomes very overwhelming.
Mai was thrown in the deep end of the big wide world and quickly realised that while high school had prepared her for university, it hadn't taught her to "adult".
"It becomes this thing that we don't talk about and we just expect everyone to know," she says.
"Like, OK, I'm all good with the educational side of things, but I don't know how to apply for a Medicare card or I don't know how to check if my immunisations are up to date.
"Am I stupider than my friends because I don't know how to do this?
"That just kind of takes away part of your confidence."
Defining what it means to be an adult can be difficult.
You turn 18 and in the eyes of the law, hey presto, you're an adult.
But are there certain responsibilities or life skills that inherently qualify as "adulting"?
For 16-year-old Casey, who is in year 11, there are.
"Adulting to me is being able to provide for yourself and being able to provide for other people," she says.
"So being able to take on responsibility for your finances, for basic things in life, like knowing how to get a Medicare card, knowing how to buy a house, how to manage a car, all of those things.
Archer, who is 18, feels he should be well-equipped with these skills but suspects he is lacking.
"I'd like to think I'm mature, but I think adulting means managing finances and bills, something I don't really do," he says.
"I don't do any trades. I don't do much hands-on work. I never really liked it.
"I'm not going to leave my house anytime soon, like at all. I'm going to be studying at uni for probably five years and that's all going to go to my HECS debt.
"So I'm just going to be sitting in my house, you know, studying, working hard, of course, but I don't need to worry about [adulting] … and there's no reason for me to because it's not practical to leave my house."
When asked if she thought her peers were similarly lacking in skills, Casey said it was pretty split.
"I think it's pretty 50–50. I think there are some people who are dead set on track, know what they're going to do with life and some people who are like, 'Ah, I don't know what I'm doing!'
This apprehension towards "adulting" is a global affliction.
In Canada, a handful of universities have begun offering Adulting 101 classes, to fill in the blanks when it comes to life skills.
In these classes students learn things like budgeting, changing a car tyre, and applying for a home loan.
Across the ditch in New Zealand, a pair of high school students has started a petition to make life skills a compulsory subject.
In our neck of the woods, just 60 per cent of young Australians say their high school education prepared them for the future, while almost 70 per cent say they've taken some form of online classes in the past year, often to do with learning basic life skills.
Those results are from Monash University's 2024 Youth Barometer Survey. Some participants felt high school hadn't equipped them with basic life skills, and it could be hard to learn them on your own.
Teenagers Briar and Mai want to address this knowledge gap by starting a social media campaign called How To Adult.
"Basically, the idea of it is a very simplified social media campaign, more like a TikTok page or a YouTube channel, where we would upload these 30 to 60-second videos, just teaching people real skills," Mai says.
"So, it's just small things and the idea of it was that we wanted to get information on how to do these things from professionals."
Briar and Mai are winners of this year's Heywire competition, an annual storytelling contest run by the ABC across regional and remote Australia.
Briar, who is 17 and in year 12 in Wooroolin, near Kingaroy in Queensland, says having a resource like this will fix a problem she feels many young Australians face.
"We just have absolutely nothing to go off and we're solely relying on our parents and getting chucked in the deep end almost to try and figure stuff out," she says.
"You'd be surprised how many people have part-time jobs within school and have no idea how to save, what to spend, applying for anything government [related], so Medicare cards."
Mai says getting professionals to teach these skills via short videos will help young Australians grow in confidence and might even help them save a bit of cash.
"Mainly kind of budgeting, renting, even as small as how to change a light bulb, you know, or how to change your car tyre," she says.
"How do you apply for a working with children check? How do you check if you're up to date on your immunisations?
"You don't want to be paying dollars for, let's say, an electrician to just change a light bulb, or you don't want to go to a mechanic to change your tyre."
Both Briar and Mai agree that schools should be taking more responsibility for teaching young Australians life skills.
"Schools have always stood for, 'We're preparing you for the real world. We're learning this maths so you can do engineering'.
"But it's never as simple as how to change your car tyre, you know?"
Briar reckons she spends too much time on things that she says are unimportant.
"It's more Shakespeare and all that fun stuff," she says.
"We just really need to home in on what's important and what's valuable to get young people educated."
"I think schools definitely [are] … a very big part of who we are becoming," Mai says.
She acknowledges that parents have a role to play, but says their time is scant.
A spokesperson for the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, which is responsible for setting the Australian curriculum, says it includes content to support the development of crucial life skills such as financial literacy, food preparation and mental health and wellbeing, and sets out skills it wants all young people to develop.
Archer reckons parents should be the ones to teach their kids to "adult", but recognises not everyone is afforded this opportunity.
"I'd like to say it's your parents [who should teach their kids], because that's what they should be doing, and they've had experience firsthand doing all the adulting stuff," Archer says.
"But not everyone's parents are a reliable source … so, I think if we want to be equal, [it should be taught in] schools."