Ever think about whether you want your child to grow up to be an entrepreneur?
Even entrepreneurial adults often, consciously or not, steer their kids in a different direction.
Do well in school so you can go to a good college, get a good job, have a reliable pension, and die happy is a mindset heavily ingrained in our society.
But we all know this is changing. The “best” jobs are no longer reserved for only those with fancy degrees from higher institutions.
Landing a job doesn’t mean that job will be around all your life. Or that you’ll have enough to live on once you reach the magical age of retirement.
While entrepreneurship definitely isn’t for everyone, there are three entrepreneurial traits we should be teaching our children throughout their lives.
Focusing on these traits will open your child up for more options as they go out into the work force, and better equip them for success if they do decide to go the traditional route of college as a jumping off point to the most prestigious job they can land.
Play More.
Skip the “My Baby Can Read” products that miraculously have your child reading before she’s one. Opt out of the preschool that has your child sitting at a desk all day learning her letters and numbers.
Instead, seek out more opportunities for your child to play. Children learn the most about life from playing. It’s through play that they develop their individuality and creativity.
The creativity required during free play develops your child’s imagination, as well as her physical and emotional strength, language skills, and self-esteem. Play is also crucial to your child’s brain development, and is a much more effective way for her to learn than sitting at a desk and focusing on learning.
What does playing have to do with entrepreneurship?
Creativity is a key trait of entrepreneurs, which comes as no surprise. Encouraging your child to do her learning through living will give her an edge when it comes to creativity and instill in her the all-important entrepreneurial spirit from an early age.
One important note that should be obvious is that “play” means get out and interact with the world. It doesn’t mean put all the kids in a room together and let them spend the day in front of the TV, on a video game, or with a smart phone.
Although such activities are exactly how many kids sadly define play these days, they have the opposite effect of sparking the creativity we’re going for here. The fewer electronic devices involved in your child’s play, the more creative it will become.
Fail More.
If you have any experience as an entrepreneur, you’ve likely failed. Probably multiple times.
And hopefully you’ve learned that failure is a good thing. That it’s through failure that we learn our biggest lessons. That we learn resilience, determination, persistence, and all kinds of other traits that serve us well in life no matter what we do.
In today’s society, the trend is to avoid failure at all costs by awarding our children a “participation medal” for just showing up. We see this in sports and school activities as well.
The sentiment is we want everyone to feel like a winner. Because being a “loser” or “failing” can be painful for a kid.
But we do our children a disservice by teaching them that they’ll get any kind of an award for just showing up in life.
We also do them a disservice by constantly praising everything they do and focusing only on the good and positive.
While it’s obviously important to build your child up and instill strong self-esteem, painting everything they do as perfect hurts them going forward.
It will take more time and effort on your part, but don’t be afraid to encourage your child to do things he might fail at, and to help him through the lessons when he does fail.
If he loses a sporting event or does poorly on a school project, acknowledge the failure and teach him how it’s a good thing and how it will serve him well going forward.
If he sees himself making progress from his failures, they’ll start to hurt less and he’ll start to look at things he defines as “failures” in a much different and more positive light.
Dream More.
If you think about it, kids spend way too much of their lives being told what they can’t do.
We think it’s cute to ask young children what they want to be when they grow up.
We smile at their responses and tell them that’s great, but then spend most of our time encouraging them in other directions if their current vision appears too unlikely.
With many schools now obsessively focused on the results of their standardized testing that allegedly measures how well they’re teaching our kids, there is little to no time for them to pursue their dreams from the time they walk through the school doors at age five.
Instead of drilling your child on her multiplication tables at night, talk to her about goals and work with her to find ways to meet the goals she has to get to where she wants to be in life.
Teach her that anything’s possible, because it is. Stop telling her to be realistic.
Hopefully, she will have some unrealistic goals. You’ve never met an entrepreneur who didn’t.
And yes, she’ll fail at reaching some of these goals, but that’s okay, as we saw above.
Every entrepreneur’s story starts with a dream they refused to give up. And even if your child doesn’t ultimately choose the entrepreneurial path, teaching her to pursue her dreams will serve her in all aspects of her life and lead her to being happier with everything she does.
One of the great things about KidsPartyCharacters.com is that it’s the kind of business your kids will love to be involved in. Instead of complaining about you working, they’ll be by your side asking to help, and soaking up all the entrepreneurial goodness while you get your work done!
As you may know, KidsPartyCharacters.com owner Cheryl Jacobs is now making it possible for you to own your very own KidsPartyCharacters.com business. She is offering a limited number of memberships that give you an exclusive area in which to book parties, the right to use all of our 200+ costumes, access to our casting director and acting coach, and full business training and support from Cheryl and the KidsPartyCharacters.com team.
If you’re a stay at home mom who’d like to create an income on your own terms, or an entrepreneur looking for another opportunity, a KidsPartyCharacters.com membership might be the perfect opportunity for you.
Book a no-pressure chat with Cheryl right here, and she’ll talk you through whether this is the right opportunity for your life.
Want to see more about what a Kids Party Character business looks like? Connect with us on Facebook for daily updates on what goes on here at KidsPartyCharacters.com.
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