Do you find your kid to be inventive and enterprising? Are they always looking for ways to make a profit or earn through entrepreneurial methods? Are they better at managing finances and using their skills to make money? If your answer is yes then it is time to recognise the entrepreneurial spirit in your kid and let it thrive. The best way to give wings to your kids’ entrepreneurship is to let them recognise problems, come up with viable solutions, and create opportunities to apply these solutions.
When you, as a parent, encourage your kid’s ability to capitalise on their skills or opportunities, you are essentially helping them become great businessmen in the future.
Nevertheless, there are also kids who don’t have such an entrepreneurial spirit. Do we need to push them towards these skills as well? Absolutely. Entrepreneurship does not start and end with business and money; it goes way beyond that. In fact, it is a way of living that can help bring about positive changes in a person’s life.
Let’s take a look at 7 ways you can teach your kids become entrepreneurs:
Condition them to recognise opportunities
Entrepreneurship, at its most fundamental level, is the ability to identify opportunities and use them to your advantage. Entrepreneur is always on the lookout for issues that they can solve using their skills. If there is an unacknowledged problem present, an entrepreneur’s job is to find practical solutions to it and make those solutions available common. In the cases where a solution is already present, an entrepreneur aims to simplify or enhance it.
It is the identification of opportunities that leads entrepreneurs to create solutions and be able to monetise them. Teach your kids to recognise opportunities and present their own solutions to various situations. It does not matter if they offer a solution that already exists as long as they are able to understand the situation and can come up with ideas to make it better.
Encourage them to solve problems
A problem solving attitude is a must for an entrepreneur. You must allow your kids to take on certain issues by themselves and be able to come up with viable solutions. This also means that you will have to back up sometimes and let your kids handle some situations. If you keep taking the big decisions for your kids, they will never learn to have their own say about things.
Nowadays, parents don’t allow kids to have their individual thought process and end up imposing their opinions on them. While, as a parent, it is our fundamental duty to protect our kids, we should avoid suffocating them with our choices and decisions. Let your kids decide for themselves, at least for certain situations. This will help them gain confidence and make informed decisions when a situation arrives.
Inspire adaptability
We all face dire situations in life and feel discouraged at times. Nevertheless, the best way to get out of a tough situation is to facing it head-on and not submitting to its pressure. We must understand that our kids will also face situations that will knock them off their feet and we won’t always be there to help them. In order to help our kids not be intimidated against situations like that is to teach them to be adaptable and resilient in the face of struggle.
Let your kids know that it is okay to fall as long as they get back up on their feet and move forward.
Entrepreneur will get knocked around in their lives a lot of times. The goal is to learn from those situations and improve so the next time one face something like that, they remain prepared. Inspire your kids to be courageous and strong no matter what they go through. This lesson does not only help in their entrepreneurial journey but also readies them to face the challenges of life.
Help them learn the basics of business
One of the most fundamental principles of being a good entrepreneur is to be able to run and make profit of a business. Help your kids establish their own business and help them through the procedure of understanding a business model. It could be anything from a lemonade stand to a school supply service, the goal is to encourage them to work hard on their idea and give practical solutions to real-world problems. Some of the basic business rules that you need to teach your kids include ‘how to sell something, how to handle rejection, and how to make the most out of a given situation.’
Once your kids have understood the basics of running a business and have set up a small enterprise themselves, they will learn the value of money and the hard work that goes into earning it. This will help them understand the importance of managing finances and being financially independent.
Give them financial literacy lessons
Money is a vast concept that needs to be understood gradually. Nevertheless, if you start teaching your kids about how money works at an early age, they will grow to value the importance of financial stability and saving. This is one of the lessons that are not taught in school, which only amplifies the importance of teaching it to your kids at home.
Children need to learn how to save money and invest it in worthy things and entrepreneurship is one of the best ways to teach that. This way, when your kids get older they learn to value money and understand the importance of saving.
Teach them to set goals
An entrepreneur must learn to set goals and be able to conquer them in a given time. If you want your kids to have entrepreneurial skills, teach them to set goals and achieve them. The goal does not have to be long-term. In fact, the more short-term the goal is, the better it is. Short-term goals are easier to achieve and don’t put much mental pressure on you, which is why it is one of the best ways to teach your kids to achieve their goals.
The goal could be anything from raising $50 by the end of the month to completing a book in a week. As long as your kids understand the value of goals and try their best to achieve them, they are on the right path. Goal setting is simple and straightforward. You just give your kids an attainable goal and a certain period of time for them to achieve it. Once your kids achieve the given goal, you reward them to teach the value of hard work.
Teach technical skills
Last, but not the least, technical skills are imperative for one to be a successful entrepreneur. The world is getting more technological with every passing day. Thus, it is important to familarise your kids with various devices and gadgets that surround us and have them learn how most of these technologies work.
The best way to get your kids to understand the fundamental of how most technology works is to teach them to code. Coding can improve creativity, critical thinking, math, and logic in kids and can help them secure a successful future. It also teaches to have a practical and creative approach to solving real-life problems. Even if your child is attracted to liberal arts and humanities, they can benefit from learning to code with block coding, as block coding is the best programming language for kids, especially for beginners.
Coding takes time and discipline to learn, which is another factor that plays a teaching role in kids learning. When kids are taught to be patient and disciplined with a subject, they learn the value of time and the importance of being in control. Coding can also help develop critical thinking and logical reasoning in kids, which are two of the most important skills to have for one to succeed in life.