Teaching Your Child To Be a Boss

Starting your own business even as an adult is a very daunting task to accomplish.  I believe teaching your child to be an entrepreneur is one of the best gifts you can give to him as a parent. Let me warn you, it is not going to be easy considering that your child has to go to school and there might be little or no time left for you to teach your child to be an entrepreneur.  Compounded with the fact that the school system is put together in such a way that it requires your child to do so much homework when he gets home from school and by the time he is done with that there’s just a little time left for you to connect with your child before you send him straight to bed so he can wake up the next morning to continue the same old process.

Need I remind you, that the financial independence majority of people enjoy is from being their own boss, from running successful businesses. Getting back to the school system, I hate to break it to you that you are probably paying through your nose for your child to go to the best school you can afford which is basically designed to get your child to follow rather than lead. Putting into consideration the fact that in the first 18 years of our kids’ lives, they are trained to do nothing that points them towards starting their own business, they are trained to wait until they finish grade school, high school, college or university as the case may be and are then trained to make sure their resume is done well as they wait in line to get jobs. Once they get a job, then they compete with others and wait for promotion and salary increase.

You may find this a little funny, but your child goes to school for eighteen years and comes out with no defined skill whatsoever and is expected to be consoled with a half empty, larger than usual font resume. Having highlighted what and where most of us have gone wrong as parents. It is important you always remember that our jobs as parents are to care for our kids and, to the best of our ability, give to them the best we can afford in order assure their future. At the risk of what I am about to suggest coming off as unconventional, I believe we as parents should step up our game and teach our kids to be bosses and not live from cheque to cheque after spending a tremendous number of their youthful years learning to be employees.

The first step to fixing this anomaly is for us parents to ask ourselves this very pertinent question that has generated the same answer from at least eighty percent of the parents I have come in contact with.

“Would you rather have your child grow up into an adult who works for a cooperation and probably living from cheque to cheque, or would you rather teach your kids to learn to start and run their own businesses thereby being entrepreneurs?”

For most parents, they would prefer their children being their own bosses. Read on and let me show you how to turn your ten-year-old into an excited business owner utilizing the little time which you two can squeeze out after you’ve both had hectic days.

1. Start off by convincing yourself that the school system although doing fairly a good job, is not one designed to teach your child how to make money after they are done from school. So you as a parent should take the bold first step of instilling in your kids the consistency, confidence, and self-esteem which he will need to run a business.

2. It’s high time we got our kids out of the couch and teach them how to develop business ideas which with your support they shall turn into successful businesses.

3. Most adults avoid starting their own businesses because of the risk involved. If your child is going to turn out to be a successful entrepreneur, you should start teaching him from a tender age that business comes with its ups and downs, and that perseverance, smart business decisions and a pinch of patience has made great businessmen and women in the past and if still applied will turn them into the entrepreneurs of their dream in the near future.

4. In order to turn your child into the entrepreneur that you will be proud of, you have to go the extra mile of teaching your children stuff like math modeling, to possess a proactive self-esteem and most importantly how to deal with people, considering the fact that businesses are built and have been found over the years to survive on a reliable and steady clientele.

5. Teach your children that the key to a great business is to identify and solve problems in their immediate communities and the world at large. Businesses around the world have survived for decades by continuing to identify the problems in the society they live in and making genuine and frantic effort to have them solved.

6. The school syllabus is designed in such a way that your children are taught based on already existent facts, your child is not given the opportunity to think, to challenge the status quo no matter how inapplicable and unimportant some of the information passed down has turned out to be for children born in the twenty-first century. Now the duty and burden lie on you to teach your child that the only way he can be a successful entrepreneur is by thinking and putting his greatest tool (his mind) to work. Remind and encourage him that ideas may not come in one day, but as long as he can think up a good business idea and how to finance it, there’s a chance he may never be sending out resumes in his life but will be at the receiving end of the resumes.

I have read about a lot of successful entrepreneurs today, and I have come to find out one thing to be common amongst a good percentage of them. They started doing businesses as children. You don’t expect your ten-year-old to at this time be able to understand completely what the market requires from him, but I am certain of the fact that as long as you give him the opportunity to engage in whatever little business for which he can safely carry out, he will with your guidance develop skills he will need as an entrepreneur.

They say practice makes perfect but it also requires time, effort and commitment and especially for kids it must also be fun.