If you took child rearing seriously, you would purchase a compound in the north-west, arm yourself with automatic handguns and tank traps to protect your family for when the big one goes up and the city hordes try to steal your supplies, and then devote yourself to teaching your children the valuable survival skill of gardening. Anything less is irresponsible and unpatriotic.
Well depends on how you look at it but having a functional food garden teaches a variety of skills and expands into some workable skills in agriculture. Project management of something that takes months to finish, monitoring the health and growth of the plants involved, even if only in a cursory way may trigger inquiry as to why variations in plant performance occur.
Now I’m not saying a kid who helps in the garden will become the next big ag conglomerate, but you can learn a hell of alot about farming/food production from a decent sized patch of dirt in your yard. With enough volume you might be able to sell to the neighbors, demonstrating the potential financial benefits of food production and cost/benefit ratio of doing so.
See, I think a lot of people are falling into the all or nothing trap here. When I say economic collapse, I don’t mean Mad Max. I mean like times are tough, it’s a great thing I can supplement my food with this garden in the backyard, giving me some fresh veggies. I am talking about the knowledge that comes from understanding the growth process. It is a deeper knowledge than, “If I give the cashier $ 1.50 I can walk out with these tomatoes I got from aisle 1.” If more people understood gardening, then environmental issues would make a whole lot more sense. We worry so much about global warming, but whether or not global warming is even real, the pollution that people attribute as its causes are definitely real and discernible to anyone that goes outside. Knowing how to garden helps one to know that contaminants in the soil make it harder to grow, or make what you do grow into an inferior product. I think that these issues are FAR MORE important than self-esteem.
As has been mentioned by a few posters, teaching self-esteem is pernicious. Self-esteem is about confidence, and I don’t know what breeds confidence better than basic survival skills. I think of the existential crises that my friends who found out that they couldn’t find a job in the subject of their degree, went through. The people I know who are more grounded in basic down to Earth skills don’t have those same kinds of crises. They don’t think that they need to be making 50k a year in their mid-twenties otherwise they are a failure, because their survival is not merely attached to the commercial system. The people I know who are the most confident, are the people who can make a simpler existence work, and make a commercial existence work. This doesn’t come about through lots of self-esteem building exercises, those are a waste of time. This comes about from practical knowledge of how the world works.
I helped my Dad as he rebuilt the entire interior of the house I grew up in through multiple iterations. I can hang drywall, I know about joists and the little metal brackets you put over the corner of joints to reinforce them, and basic electrical. Now, I wouldn’t say that I am good at any of those things, but I know how to do them. Living in the city, I know people who do not know how to handle their circuit breakers, or change a spark plug. At this point in the game it’s often cheaper to have someone change your oil than to do it yourself, but I could do it if I had to.
Even though I don’t do most of these things as I live in apartments and do not own a car, the knowledge that I could gives me more confidence. I didn’t learn these things to build my self-esteem, I learned them because we needed to do them.
The bottom line is, regardless of the self-esteem building that went on performing those tasks, the kids that learned to garden are far more likely to be involved in their community gardens than the kids who didn’t. Throughout their lives. This isn’t a function of their increased self-esteem, it’s a function of the fact that they know how to garden.
Drywall hanging is a survival skill?
Well, being able to build a domicile is.
No, being able to build a domicile is not a survival skill. Being able to find or build a shelter sufficient to keep one alive is a survival skill. For example, being able to a quinsey in a blizzard is a survival skill. Being able to hang drywall inside a house during a blizzard is not a survival skill.
:rolleyes: Survival is not just about extreme emergencies.
But if it helps you, I am glad that I know how to build a campfire, though since I couldn’t really do it in a Blizzard isn’t an essential survival skill I suppose. 
Here’s the thing… Basic skills are basic skills, and add to your “tool box”.
That increases survivial skills, and perhaps more importantly confidence, regardless if that knowledge involves tomoato horticulture or drywall hanging.
The other thing is that when you learn a basic skill, you also learn another, more subtle lesson… that being “Hey! I can learn new stuff!”… That leads to flexibility, adaptability and an openess to change that really adds to one’s ability to survive.
I echo the comments on the “self esteem” junkies/pushers who have reduced praise for a task accomplished to a meaningless level of empty polite phrasology. One of the major causes of “asshole-ism” in modern society is people who have an artificially enlarged sense of “self esteem/entitlement” as they have been raised to feel they are near godlike in their nature, due to being praised for “putting on their socks” all by themselves 340 times. These are the same folks who but in line, rage at ice cream vendors because they are out of triple chocolate fudgy bars (How DARe you do this to ME!!?? This is unacceptable!!") or post requests for sympathy because they got caught doing something bad/unethical/selfish etc.
Regards
FML
Whether or not you have a particular skill has no relation to whether that skill is a survival skill.
For some folks, survival skills means being able to balance a small dog under one’s arm while shopping for fashion accessories. For other folks, survival skills means having the skill to physically survive until the situation is remedied.
Suggesting that non-survival skills, such as gardening and drywall hanging, are survival skills is as silly as Hilton.
I guess I’ll live on in my fantasy world where knowing how to grow lettuce and build a shelter in the summer to keep out the biting frost in the winter are more essential than being able to find the perfect purse for my pocket dog.