Dailey Bailey: Seven Skills Your Grandparents Had That You Don’t

You might think your grandparents are clueless because they can’t program the DVR or video chat. But they know how to do a lot of stuff that you don’t. Here’s a list of seven skills most people don’t have anymore.

1. Cooking from scratch. Not following a recipe, but actually improvising with food. Before microwaves and TV dinners, people just had to know how to work with what they had, and make it taste good.

2. Sewing. Also crocheting, quilting, darning, needlepoint, and all that related stuff. If we have holes in our socks, we throw them away. Your grandparents actually sat down and fixed them. Men too . . . they had to do it by themselves in the Army.

3. Canning. A couple people do it now if they’re really into home gardening. But fifty years ago, just about everybody did it.

4. Ironing. It used to be that you would iron everything off the clothesline. Now we just iron dress clothes, and most of the time we don’t even do it right.

5. Meeting people in person . . . by talking. A lot of us meet new people online nowadays. When we’re out in public, face to face with real people, we IGNORE them . . . so we can stay online instead.

6. Haggling. Before everything was sold in chain superstores, people used to haggle a lot. Now you never even get to try, except on Craigslist and at the car dealership.

7. Writing letters. Your grandparents used to write beautiful letters all the time, with pen and paper, and mail them in envelopes. The writing you do on Facebook and Twitter . . . your grandparents would have called that being illiterate.

And they’d be right. A recent study found that 67.3% of Facebook posts are written at a fifth grade reading level or lower.