10 Life Lessons Parent Entrepreneurs Can Teach Their Children
Written by Ben Robinson
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The best way to instill any ability in someone is to begin teaching them very early on. Entrepreneurial skills are no exception.
By teaching entrepreneurship lessons to their young children, parents can do a huge service to the ones they’re raising.
Below are 10 of the most useful entrepreneurial skills parents should impart on their children while their minds are still forming.
Most of these skills are also applicable to a lot of adults, but teaching them to young kids is even more important.
1. Multiplying Money
Teach your kids never to throw away or waste money, even if the amount seems negligible to them.
Two dollars may seem like a paltry sum, but it can multiply exponentially if invested wisely. A few plastic cups and a can of lemonade concentrate cost next to nothing, but the lemonade stand a child can stock with them might draw in ten times the cost.
2. Waiting for Your Opening
A lot of the time, the “try, try again” approach is needed to make business deals go through. Unfortunately, it’s not a very popular mindset among children. In fact, children are often discouraged from asking for something more than once.
If kids are taught that quiet persistence and perseverance are sometimes the only ways to access a goal, they will learn to incorporate it into many aspects of their future life.
3. Working From Home
It’s important to demonstrate to young children what a healthy work-leisure balance looks like. Having a workspace in the house is a good idea, and formulating a structured work-from-home schedule helps too.
Showing that mommy and daddy work from home too will certainly make a child more diligent when it comes to academic homework. But it may also persuade them to begin thinking about home businesses at an earlier age.
This one has the bonus of making you lots of money working remotely. It’s a win-win.
4. Listening to Others
Make sure your conversations with your child are back-and-forths, not one-way exchanges.
First, this will get them used to expressing their own ideas, which is important for any professional. Second, it will show them that everyone needs to be open to outside suggestions. No one has all the answers, not even parents.
5. Being Adaptable
Thrusting a young child into unfamiliar cultures and situations may feel uncomfortable at first, but it will pay off as they learn important adaptability skills.
Being able to adapt your behavior to the person you’re communicating with is an extremely important skill in any sort of negotiation. Children have a habit, though, of acting the same way no matter who they’re talking to.
Change this habit, and you’ll more than likely change your child’s social and business skills for the better.
6. Think Differently
Thinking differently and coming up with alternative solutions to problems is what entrepreneurship is all about. Unfortunately, most kids are taught how to follow orders in a very specific way.
To promote an entrepreneurial mindset, it’s important young kids feel completely comfortable proposing new ways to accomplish certain tasks.This will prompt them to come up with alternate solutions later in life.
7. Learning From Failures
When your children experience failure, many people will tell them it’s a bad thing.
It’s your job to tell your child that nothing is wrong with failure, as long as you can learn something from it. Make it into a game to examine the failure to find out why it occurred, so that it can be prevented in the future.
You should of course not encourage failure, but you should take most of the negative connotation away from it, so your child is not afraid to take bold risks.
8. Write Down Your Goals
Almost all successful entrepreneurs actually write down their goals before attempting them. It’s a system that really works, and studies show that written goals are 80-90% more likely to be accomplished than unwritten ones.
Kids love adhering to a system, and the most effective written goals adhere to the S.M.A.R.T. system — they are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. You might need to simplify the words a bit for younger children, but the ideas should be the same.
9. Saving Money
Teach your kid financial prudency. One trick you may want to try is giving your child two piggy banks, one for short-term spending money and one for savings. Encourage them to distribute money between both.
This probably goes without saying, but also let your child manage all of his or her own money.
10. Understand Good Customer Service
Customer satisfaction is king in the world of modern entrepreneurship. So having ideas about what constitutes good and bad customer service is an important entrepreneurship skill for children to have.
Every now and then, just ask your child what they thought of that waiter or that shopkeeper. Did they do a good job? Why do you say that?
It’s been shown countless times that young children are more open to life lessons than anyone else. Parents need to take advantage of that fact to teach children the skills that count. Doing so will prepare the child for the world that we live in and give them a jump on their peers.
MAYBE THE BEST TIP OF ALL IS TO TEACH BY EXAMPLE. YOU HAVE TO BE FISCALLY RESPONSIBLE YOURSELF, AND A GREAT WAY TO DO THAT IS BY LEARNING BOOKKEEPING WITH US.
Let’s raise your kids to be entrepreneurs!
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