Entrepreneurs are a vital part of our society. New innovations and inventions come from people brave enough to take their ideas to completion to provide our society with products and services that enrich our lives. Homeschooling is the perfect environment to encourage our kids’ natural creative tendencies to become kid entrepreneurs.
Homeschool Parents are Entrepreneurs
Homeschool parents are actually entrepreneurs themselves because we’ve seen the product of “regular” school and decided to create a different educational experience for our families. We saw the system and said, “I can do better!” This is the start for all entrepreneurs.
Our service IS our homeschool. The difference is that nobody is paying us for this service. We provide it to our families in exchange for high-fives and hugs. Our return on investment is seeing our kids grow in knowledge and experience first hand.
My daughter’s “business” is walking neighbors dogs.
Cultivating the Entrepreneurial Spirit
Kids naturally want to explore, investigate, create, and build. Many times the ideas for entrepreneurship take root in the beginnings of the creative process. Kids aren’t thinking about building a business when they first start creating and building. Sometimes it starts with creating art and putting on a show or store for the parents. I’m sure I’m not the only parent who has bought artwork that their kids have created!
Kids see examples of business all around them. It’s only natural for them to wonder what they can create that others may find valuable. The lemonade stand has been the starting point for many budding kid entrepreneurs for generations. Let’s encourage our kids to take it a few steps further!
Homeschooling gives us the freedom to allow our kids the time and space to head down this road. The structure of “regular” school promotes conformity which can quickly squash entrepreneurial curiosity. The freedom to create and build is often limited to science experiments and perhaps STEM topics such as robotics. That’s not enough. As homeschoolers, we can do better. We need to encourage our kids to continue asking, “What if?”
Benefits of Raising Kid Entrepreneurs
Helping our kids develop the skills needed to provide a service or product that others find valuable is a fantastic way to cover a wide variety of life skills such as…
- Learning and perfecting handicraft skills
- Product or service development and improvement
- Real world application of traditional school subjects
- Developing diligence, persistence, dedication, and problem solving skills
- Social interaction with customers
Related Post – Teaching Money Management to Kids
Every Adult is an Entrepreneur
Not only are kids and homeschooling parents natural entrepreneurs, every adult is too. Even if you don’t own your own business or have a side-hustle, you are selling yourself as a product and service to the company that employs you. You sell yourself during the interviews, probation period, and every day during your employment. We often forget this. Instead we’re conditioned see entrepreneurs as people who take huge risks while encountering multiple devastating failures.
When we think of entrepreneurs, we often think of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and others of that caliber. We think that we (or our kids) will never be one of them, so we don’t even try. Each of them started with “What if?” Of course they had many failures, but they persisted and eventually developed valuable products and services.
However, we forget about the everyday “normal” people who own their own businesses all over our communities. These are the “mom & pop” stores and other small businesses that help our communities thrive. Each of these businesses start with someone deciding to provide a service or sell a product in their OWN business instead of working as an employee in someone else’s business. They are entrepreneurs who provide vital goods and services in our communities. They, too, often have failures, but they persist just like the Elon Musks of the world. Entrepreneurs at every level enrich our lives every single day.
Diving Deep into Raising Kid Entrepreneurs
I had a really hard time figuring out just how to fit everything I wanted to say into just one post, so I decided to turn this into a bit of a series. This is a path my family has been on for a few years with our kids, but it goes back to my husband being an entrepreneur and even back to my Dad. There’s so much that I want to share about what we’ve learned and things we’ve done to help our kids make the connection between homeschool and developing an entrepreneurial mindset. I’m excited to be exploring this topic more in upcoming posts!
Are you encouraging your kids to become entrepreneurs? What are their budding businesses?
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