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Survival guide for kids leaving home

by Roger Sinasohn (Subscribe to Roger Sinasohn's posts)
Sep 4th 2008 2:00PM

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Filed under: Teens, Day Care & Education, Chores, Resources, Books for Kids

The cover of the book One of the fast food restaurants had a commercial wherein a young man was in a grocery store holding two packages of meat, his gaze swinging back and forth between the two. Finally, he just drops the meat and hightails it out of the store like the devil himself were chasing him. The tag line then came on saying, "Without us, some guys would starve." Sure, you can dismiss it as simply clever marketing, but I actually know a guy who was just like that before he got married.

Author Sharon E. McKay knows someone like that too -- her son. He actually got scurvy because he thought he could live on chicken wings and beer alone. She and Kim Zarzour, a journalist, decided they had to do something to help all those newly liberated "grown-ups" stay alive in the wild world of momlessness. So they wrote a book: Good To Go: A Practical Guide to Adulthood. It's packed with all the things a young adult needs to know in the big world outside mom's reach. Like cooking. "And of course," says Zarzour of her son's attempt at heating chicken nuggets, "he's yelling out: 'What's a cookie sheet?' I mean, how did I not remember to teach him what a cookie sheet was?"

These days, it seems like kids have a lot more to learn before they leave the nest -- computers, higher math, more politics and world history -- than did my parents. My dad joked that he only learned to add and subtract; he had no need for multiplication and division. These days, kids need a lot more than that to get into a good college. It seems the practical skills have gotten left behind. I'd say this book sounds pretty necessary, these days.

Tags: adult, adulthood, chores, college, cooking, household, survival, university

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