Teach Your Kids About Entrepreneurship

Written on June 8, 2010 by Garland Coulson

Kids are natural entrepreneurs.  They trade amongst themselves and are creative in coming up with money making ideas.

Unfortunately we usually squelch this early creativity and soon turn them into mindless work drones

The problem starts with parents.  Most parents have worked at jobs all their life.  It is all they know.   So a kid learns early that Mom or Dad or both have to go to work every day and exchange their time for a bit of money to keep a roof over their heads and buy groceries.  All they learn is how to become wage slaves.

The problem continues in school.  Here, it is even worse.  Most teachers went from being a student in school to being a student in university then to teaching in school.  They not only have no entrepreneurship experience, most have never worked in a standard type job where results are measured other than some part time jobs while they were being educated.

School career counselors aren’t business owners and once again focus on “jobs” as the only career choice.

So the primary role models for kids are job-slave parents and never-escaped-from-school teachers and school counsellors.

So what can we do to teach kids about entrepreneurship?

First, look to ourselves as parents.  Even if you do work at a 9 to 5 job, you can encourage your kids to be entrepreneurs by:

• Listening to their money making ideas and encouraging them.
• Teaching them that small business owners are important to the community as they create local jobs and make local products and services available that might otherwise be missing.  If you constantly complain about business people, you are infecting your kids with an anti-business attitude.
• Teach them about finance or enroll them in courses that teach them how to manage their money.
• If you know successful business people, ask them to talk to your kids and share their experience.  Perhaps your kids could shadow them for a day or a week to get a feel for what they do.

Secondly, look at the schools your kids go to.  Does your school have a youth entrepreneurship program?  If not, spearhead an effort to get a Junior Achievement program going in your school.  Junior Achievement has a number of entrepreneurship and financial training programs for youth.

Your child may be the next Bill Gates or Thomas Edison.  Don’t let your kid’s natural entrepreneurial talents get crushed by our anti-entrepreneurial education systems!  Take action to encourage your young entrepreneur today.

Garland Coulson. "The EBusiness Tutor" is an Internet Marketing Speaker, Internet Mentor and Entrepreneur who teaches beginners how to succeed online.

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