Spokane Washington

Kids And Money - Do You Have What It Takes To Raise An Entrepreneur?

You don't have to be perfect parents to raise self-reliant entrepreneurs. You don't have to be a hugely successful business-person yourself, either.

Success is largely a matter of attitude, and a success attitude could make you a very successful volunteer fire-fighter, or a very successful lay preacher, or a very successful elementary school teacher.

As parents, our role is to provide our kids with a success attitude, not to give them really good footsteps and hope they follow in them.

A key factor in the success of the Cash-Smart Kids program is that parents and kids do it together, and there are opportunities for parents, as well as kids, to learn new ideas and new skills, and for their kids to see them doing it.

A major factor in success is continuous, lifelong learning. Your kids will look at you, and if you appear to have stopped learning things years ago, your kids will expect to stop learning when they become adults. It doesn't have to be book learning that you are doing, or even organized courses - you could take up woodworking, or knitting, or doing the family tree. Just so long as you are always practicing, finding out new information, and struggling yourself with the discomfort and awkwardness of being a beginner.

Your child will learn just as much from watching your learning process as they do from their own.

The second major factor in success is giving things 100%, and doing the best you can, even if that's not very good right now. The old fable of the hare and the tortoise demonstrates the power of doing one's best, even when things look hopeless.

So often, by the time our kids are in elementary school, life has dealt us a series of disappointments, and we may not have quite the level of drive we did as teenagers.

It's tempting to take the easy way out, sometimes. You've set aside some time after dinner to go through the pile of papers and file them, and then at the time you find you are really tired, and someone puts on the TV ...

Your kids are watching.

Jenny Ford is an expert in educating children about business and wealth creation. She is one of the founders of http://www.Cash-Smart-Kids.com, and her blog can be seen at http://www.RaisingEntrepreneurs.org She holds an Honours degree in Psychology, a Diploma in Training and Assessment Systems, and an Advanced Diploma in Business Management. She is the mother of three young entrepreneurs, all of whom started successful businesses when they were nine to twelve years old.

posted by philadelphia-paxitfb @ 1:40 PM