How To Teach Entrepreneurship To Children?

While schools do their best to prepare students academically for the future ahead, our kids become increasingly thirsty for proper business education which is not a part of school curricula yet. And while some children may be willing to run a lemonade stand to make quick money, others are keen to learn about business in greater detail.

The educational business project Miss M Online Classes introduces children to the concepts of competition, promotion, differentiation and other marketing elements which help enterprising children build a bigger picture of the world of business and confidently navigate its core elements.

Research shows that entrepreneurship is a skill of the future along with interpersonal effectiveness and digital literacy. No wonder why many parents today want their children to acquire this important skill earlier. Not only entrepreneurial education helps children become financially resourceful in life, it also helps build confidence to innovate and commercialise new ideas that will benefit people and the world.

Interest among students towards entrepreneurship is high.

Here are a few findings:

Generation alpha – today’s primary school students who began to be born in 2010 – show earlier commercial sophistication.
90% of generation Z students want to run their own business, either full time or part time.
Financial independence and freedom is among top 5 hopes of generation Z students.

Thus, children are keen to learn business foundations and while entrepreneurship is not a final goal of school education, it is a great opportunity not to be missed in connecting school subjects to real life and empowering students to pursue independent learning beyond the classroom.

Benefits of teaching entrepreneurship to children.

The main benefit of starting business as a child is growing motivation by understanding why and how the wider knowledge will help them win the entrepreneurial game.

When I work as a casual relief teacher across primary & secondary schools, one thing that consistently stands out for me is the level disengagement among children. The kids are simply not interested in doing inspirational writing every single day. The prompts that are given to them are not engaging, to say the least. So while they duly do the assignments, I can generally see no spark in their eyes.

Now imagine they need to create a landing page of their website or a product description about something that fascinates their minds, be it travel, or technology, or a social cause. And there is real competition they should keep an eye on! By how well they do their job depends on whether they attract any customers and earn any money. Now, that is a reason in itself to do well and explore how to spell correctly, how to structure a persuasion piece, how to use the verbs of action (and obviously, know the other parts of speech). The list of skills the kids need for this task goes on and on and extends into maths, in order to calculate profits, bundles and prices, as well as science, geography, etc. depending on the chosen area.

Other benefits of teaching kids about entrepreneurship include learning to plan, prioritise, and overcome failures in a safe environment under the supervision of parents or carers. Many would agree that these are essential life skills that will benefit children when they are young and when grown up.

How parents can encourage entrepreneurial thinking in children.

Let’s be honest: not all kids are entrepreneurial by nature, and that’s totally fine. Our goal as parents is to help discover kids’ natural talents and help develop them further.

Here’re a few ideas to see if your child has interest in becoming an entrepreneur and how to build it:

Read about entrepreneurs and their journeys, which are often inspiring real life stories, such as Shoe Dog by the founder of famous Nike Corporation Phil Knight.
Visit small business owners in your neighbourhood and talk to them about what it takes to run a business, which skills a successful entrepreneur must have and what challenges they face every day.
Ask your child about pros and cons of being an entrepreneur vs an employee.
Visualise how their life will look like when they run their own business. Try to avoid idealisation and remind about many failures successful entrepreneurs had to go through.
Encourage your child think how they could have overcome those situations and which skills they already have or need to learn to achieve business success.

Not only you’ll connect with your child through such conversations, but you’ll give them a direction of thinking and exploring the entrepreneurial world further.

Business education for children

If you discover that the idea of running a business fascinates your child, then deep dive into business courses for kids, such as Miss M Online Classes which are specially designed for children 8+ and cover key elements of entrepreneurship, marketing and financial literacy basics.

What you want at this stage is that kids grow confidence in pursuing knowledge, get curious to understand business concepts of competition, promotion, differentiation and how they affect buying decisions of customers. It is not the amount of money they’ll make that matters, it is the ability to observe, analyse, draw conclusions and come up with great ideas in order to develop an attractive offer potential customers would be willing to pay for.