We started building the house we live in around the time our eldest was under a year old, and moved in when our second kid was just a baby, about two years later. So with their natural kids' ability to extrapolate from their own experience to the whole world, they're sure that when they turn eighteen they'll have to build a house themselves before they can move out!
But basically in practical terms they get to experience the process of building. And I'm not a professional builder, so a lot of that is just involving them as I work stuff out for myself. That goes from helping measure stuff out, to hanging around a building site and learning simple physics (I really am building it
alone, so stuff like lifting beams into place with only one person means there are lots of lessons to be learned about leverage and the like
), to learning how to use hand tools, or non-dangerous power tools. There are also a lot of lessons about planning ahead - so that when you come to do claddings and interior linings, there's a bit of frame everywhere you need to nail them on, and there are no floor joists directly under where the bathroom drains go - that sort of thing. It's often difficult or near-impossible to fix these things when you work out you need them, they have to be got right back at the previous step. The kids got a chance get involved in this sort of stuff when we built their treehouse together.
The kids have their own gardens, and meals get planned around any vegetables they've managed to grow, and while we have no livestock of our own, our neighbours do so they're familiar with how their food gets on their table. Our own conversations about bio-ethics started when it came time to eat animals they had met. It's an interesting area to discuss with children, and I feel the discussion process is far more important than the outcome (so far, they're good with it, with some reservations, quite thoughtfully based.)
But the main impact of our lifestyle is that we're home most of the time (me 100%, my wife all but 14 hours a week) and we get a reasonable proportion of the things we need by making them ourselves (furniture, buildings, landscaping, gardens, toys, food, music), while we happily buy other stuff (food, books, toys, technology, transport). It's the balance that I think is good to get away from the cargo cult mentality that kids can experience in our overly consumerist world where it seems almost everything one owns is bought, not made, and that you can only get things by earning money and then buying something as a finished product, rather than by sourcing materials and skills and managing things yourself. I think that's why cooking is so important - working from ingredients is something we all could stand to do more of in other areas of life.
If we are buying things, we also prefer to deal directly with the makers if that's possible - so we've got many things in our house that we had people we know make for us, from furniture to clothes, to art, and I like the idea that our kids will know that if you need something made, a shop with mass-produced stuff isn't their only option, even if it is often a good option.
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Teaching kids money sense - and that $$$ doesn't grow on trees, as they say - is a good idea. (Wish my folks had educated me properly on the subject.) Setting up a basic home economy would be a nice way to demonstrate key concepts such as earnings, savings, borrowing, over-extension, etc. The problem is that a family normally operates on social rules (where helping each other for free), as opposed to market rules (actions have monetary value). When we mix the two, all sorts of problems can spring up.
Perhaps you have some stories to share?
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