You want to do the best for your kids, to give them the skills and knowledge they will need to be successful entrepreneurs. It can be done, but the education system is not much help so you have to do it yourself.
Entrepreneurship image from Pixabay
Is education a waste of time? No, but it is often irrelevant to becoming an entrepreneur. Schools never teach the knowledge, attitudes, and skills that are the foundations of entrepreneurship
Knowledge
Your son or daughter needs an understanding of business principles, the stock market, and politics.
Business Principles
The concept of profit as opposed to selling price can be a tricky one.
Children quickly grasp the idea of money and how selling something can give them more of it. However, the idea of paying for the raw materials takes a little persuasion – If they have a lemonade stand, make sure they buy their own lemons and sugar. If you buy the raw materials and they keep the entire sales value that is hardly a realistic business education.
Teach your kids that a business makes money by solving problems people have.
Social media marketing image by Joseph Mucira from Pixabay
Marketing is often overlooked as an entrepreneurial skill, yet no business can ever succeed unless the owner understands how to demonstrate how her products solve customer problems. Social media marketing is an area most kids understand intuitively because it is the medium they are exposed to all the time. Help them to understand the subtleties of the marketing messages they are exposed to every day.
Stock Market
High schools may include business studies, but it is better to learn at an earlier age.
Show your children how you invest in stocks. Explain the principle of share ownership, and some of the reasons why the values of stocks move up and down. Start a family competition using virtual trading accounts with a real money prize for any gains your kids make. Choose penny stocks for a more interesting ride. Explain how these stocks are more volatile and the basics of trading penny shares as a day trader.
With teenagers, you can move onto CFDs (contracts for difference). Start with a demo account again, so learning won’t cost real money.
Politics
Politics means learning how and why people act in certain ways. If you look for them, there will be plenty of opportunities in day-to-day life.
Get involved as a family with local community groups, youth groups, and charities. Help your child understand the reasons why the adults he meets behave the way they do.
Attitudes
Entrepreneurs have different attitudes to employees – They are survivors, confident, and unafraid to fail. You CAN raise entrepreneurial kids.
You have to let your children fail, let them run out of cash before their next allowance is due. Never loan next week’s allowance, kids have to learn that there is a finite supply of money. If he or she chooses to negotiate, great! Lend them money at an interest rate they will understand – “I will lend you $5, you will need to repay me $6 in two days’ time.”
Failing to success is an attitude your child will find difficult to grasp, yet many entrepreneurs see this as the key to their success
Skills
He or she needs skills, including; coping, judgment, and people skills.
The hardest thing about being a parent is letting your child make mistakes. However, if you butt in every time you see something bad about to happen, your child doesn’t learn. If your son o daughter makes no mistakes when they are young, they learn nothing, and make bigger errors of judgment when they are older.
We learn by making mistakes. Let your kids make mistakes then discuss them afterward, without letting on that you could see the way the situation was going to pan out.
Help your son understand why his ‘friends’ are acting the way they are. If he understands their reasoning he will be able to cope more easily. More importantly, he will apply what he learns to similar situations in the future.
Support your daughter when things go wrong and help her to see how the situation developed badly, and what might have happened if she had done things differently. Help her learn from the experience so she will be better prepared next time.
Takeaways
Teaching entrepreneurship skills to your children is down to YOU. Your son or daughter is totally immersed in your family environment from birth. You have teaching opportunities that will never come up in a school or college.
Make sure you extract the most value from every learning opportunity that presents itself. Encourage your kids to be independent. Help them learn to handle money, on a day-to-day basis and investing it. Create situations where your child will meet and interact with other adults.
