Kids Can Make Money: Starting Early
The seeds of entrepreneurship are sown earlier than we think. We were taught the principles of trade when we were merely babies. Weren’t we all told to trade our nice deeds for the year with Santa’s gifts?
An enterprising attitude starts way before we get introduced to girl scout cookie selling, which by the way are really charity cookies, and adults buy them knowing that they ARE overpriced. We start out with toy money, and we pretend that we are selling stuff to our elders. In fact, even the credit concept started this way for us. They (adults) avail of our services, make us do errands and promise to compensate us. So, that makes several concepts learned with just one errand: credit, employment and business.
To kids, the credit concept starts out by learning the meaning of a promise.
When someone promised to pay something back, we believed the person. Then we soon discover that we cannot depend on an open-ended promise to get our due, so we set deadlines on promises, and eventually develop a system to remind that grown up about his promise. Thus, the concept of credit and debt is born.
Then there’s the investment concept.
A kid who might want to sell lemonades must work to build his store. Parents could be the ones who will pay for the lemons, but the child has to help prepare them. He does the cleaning of the stall, squeezing lemonade and vending. All his efforts are suitably rewarded when people start buying. A wise parent will gently remind his son that the lemons cost something, so that the child could deduct that cost to obtain his final profit at the end of the day.
It doesn’t take much for kids to develop an entrepreneurial spirit, and parents will discover that when a child learns something early, he keeps the knowledge throughout his life.
