Life Skills for Children – Why You Should Start a Family Business With Your Kids

Teaching life skills to your children can be fun, give them great lessons for life, and give your family some real quality time together.

One way to give this important life coaching to your children is to teach them the basics of running a business. You don’t have to be a successful business owner yourself, because you can learn alongside your children. As an adult you can look for the right starting point and guide your children through the life lessons of starting and running a small family business. There are so many ways for you to start that you can do it with a very small outlay and a small investment of your time each week.

I’m not recommending that you turn your child into a corporate dragon or a money obsessed entrepreneur. Making money from your family venture is a secondary objective. If making a profit is an issue do it for charity or a good cause that the kids will buy into. The primary goal is to spend time with your children while they learn life skills such as: confidence, communication skills, real mathematics, and social skills. These are skills and development topics that are not fully covered in schools. Yet a basic understanding of business, income, and expenditure, will help them in so many ways.

Here are some of the life skills your children can gain from starting a business with you:

Confidence

Making decisions and taking actions gives us confidence when we have to make decisions in the future. We learn from making good decisions and from making mistakes. With a small part time business you can let your children grow their confidence, with you there to coach and mentor them. Think about what you would have done differently in your life if you had grown your confidence and self belief as a youngster. Now you have the opportunity to pass that message on to your children.

Communication skills

We are all judged by others by the way we communicate, whether it is a simple email, a written letter, or a face to face conversation. People will relate how your children communicate to a perceived level of intelligence. Start a small business where your kids learn to communicate, add some growing confidence, and they will be seen as bright with lots of emotional intelligence.

Understanding finance

Whether we like it or not, as our children become adults they will need to understand money. Just running a house requires a grasp of income and outgoings. How many young people get into debt that takes them years to recover from? Running a small business with you means they will learn money skills that will benefit them for life.

Now take some action

Get the kids involved and start your business project together. Discuss what you want to do, how you want to do it, and if you make some money what will you do with it. You could start off with car boot sales, yard sales, or even a weekend market stall. If standing out in the cold isn’t for you what about selling on EBay, or even building your own website.

My personal favourite is to start an online business with the help of a business package and action plan. Selling online will teach your children valuable computer skills and improve their written communication and creative thinking. Your next step is to get the family together and get them interested in this exciting new venture.