How Should Parents’ Guide Their Teenagers to Becoming Entrepreneurs Without Butting in?
Teenage is a tricky age where the young generation gets ushered into adulthood. It’s a decisive age where you the parent need to take care what you do or say to them since it may break or build them up to someone you imagined them to be, or even better. Obviously, this is considering that no parent wants their kid to end up helpless.
It is an age associated with pesky behavior and divulgences into cons in society such as engaging in alcoholism and peer pressure. It’s the age your teen will look for an acknowledgment from anyone willing enough to offer it without making them jump hoops. Since no teen wants to get tired of being involved in physical activities that may wear their bodies out as they are cautious of their bodies too.
On the contrary, in the same pods of teenage, those with exceptional vision and drive in their life tend to break out of this pods, and come up with genius ideas driven to industrialization and managerial production. This is where you as a parent is needed to mature them into this new venture they take up, avoiding micromanaging them as it may have detrimental consequences. Here are five questions on how you as a parent should achieve this.
Goals
What is your ultimate goal? This is a valid question, avoiding butting in, gauging whether your teen is dedicated to achieving their new found hobby. It tells of how extensively they have thought out their plans and, how prepared they are to tackle them. Gauging whether your kid is faced by fear of failure in the process is achieved by this simple question.
Here you are assigned an instrumental role to guide but not to give ideas on how you would go about it. By this, you are empowered to ask them to generate plans they have set out to achieve this goal.
Time
Time, as they say, waits on no man. You should get them to explain to you the time schedules they have panned out. Following set goals being achievable, timely evaluations of the growth of the business are needed. These act as gauges whether to improve or expand, or make changes such as making financial cutbacks to manage overflowing costs draining accounts. By asking, how long will it take to achieve this goal, you are able to tackle this question as well as get them hyped up to meet their goals on time.
Make sure their goals are attainable, time-phased and eventually, realistic. Creating time-phased goals may act as a tool for encouragement and a source of motivation. Dividing the goals into; short-term, medium and long-term goals will help create time schedules. They can be checked off once time has expired on the schedules to gauge achievements made or to gauge how long it will take to achieve set goals.
Instrumental persons
Know instrumental persons in your teenagers’ life, not necessarily yourself as a parent. These are the people that play a bigger role in steering the ship to dock. They range to everyday acquaintances such as their teachers and friends to, their role models. By letting your teens bask in the verse knowledge in the bookshops and libraries about their role models and hurdles they have had to make to achieve their goals, tends to encourage them further.
Furthermore, arranging surprise visits to visit other people in the same industries as they may be instrumental to them. this can be a sort of symposium, where they will exchange ideas and maybe learn from mistakes they have made by collecting minds together to solve hectic problems they face in the business. This further falls into improving networking to get prerequisite experience where necessary. Eventually, this will open a market for your teenager to invest in with the products they offer from their business.
Material
Availability of materials is instrumental to any business since this is the engine that runs the whole project. Materials include the main ingredient of the product and finances to fund the project. To become a teenage entrepreneur, one has to tackle the question of finance. As a parent, offering them capital to start the business may end up being a huge mistake too when they get investors to invest in their ideas. This is because the teenager will be faced by a familiar threat of family capital that may have no consequences in the long run.
By exposing them to various venues of capital generation such as banks and venture capitalists, will help them get a larger pool for investors with whom they are answerable to, on how they spend monies allocated to them. this will eventually lead to a shrewd businessman being created in your teen; who can evaluate necessities from amenities.
Accelerators meaning objects to jumpstart this idea may be instrumental too as additive materials that can be in cooperated in achieving this task.
Barriers
These are blockages that teens may face in their quest to kick start their business. By asking them, what are the barriers you intend to face in this venture, you are able to gauge where they may need your help. Before offering the needed help, you are to let them fail first so as not to defeat the meaning of being an entrepreneur and avoid butting in.
By not letting your teen be risk-averse, you will be creating a force to be reckoned with. This is the case where they will tend to think outside the box in order to solve upcoming issues in their business. Eventually, they may end up even surprising you with their achievements and deals they negotiate in the process.
Reviewing these questions with your teenager tends to open them up to a whole new world of ideas they hadn’t anticipated. This tends to open up their minds further and make them surgical in the decisions they make. They also get the understanding this is no longer a game but an event Darwin theory for survival where only those tailored to be entrepreneurs can survive while the others tend to fail. Becoming a teenage entrepreneur in the long run to a parent will be beneficial since it tends to reduce burdens they may face bringing up teens that aren’t future-oriented.
boardroom table businessman standing
