Raising Our Children to Succeed in a Fast, Ever-Changing, and Complex World
The Curiously Fruity Flavors of Sweet-Tasting Lemonade Stand Education
A Brief Excursion into Lip-smackingly Delicious, Homemade Childhood Entrepreneurship
My sister and I had a lemonade stand — with a two-drink minimum.
- Wendy Liebman
Our kids recently spent a week this summer transacting a series of property deals. The middle child turned out the most successful. Over three successive transactions, he returned 270% on his initial investment. His last deal was a multi-level, Tudor-style construction.
Our kids are 13, 11, and 8.
And throughout that week, as they anticipated the closing of each deal, the excitement was palpable.
They spent the week as virtual estate moguls, immersed in an architecture and construction business learning experience. They bought, developed, and sold property in a Minecraft City, in an online business simulation camp offered by Connected Camps via Outshool.
(Minecraft is an online game that allows anyone to pretty much build, in a virtual world, any 3D structure they can imagine. Connected Camps is a not-for-profit organization providing connected learning experiences that foster creativity, problem-solving, collaboration and interest-driven learning. Outschool is a learning provider that offers small-group online classes to kids from anywhere in the world.)
At the start of the week, each participant received the same amount of money. They then had to buy land, invest in building materials, bid on contracts, and build to customer specs. Over the course of the week, the kids had to work to earn the most profit.
Our middle child, like everyone else, started with 2,000 currency units. For the purposes of this article, I am going to call the currency units, ludens — my generic term for play money. His first significant project grew his investment fund to 2,800 ludens. He spent 250 ludens on materials and sold his construction for 1,050 ludens.
But his most ambitious project was his third. Short on funds, he borrowed a non-interest loan of 200 ludens. Then plowed 3,000 ludens into that project. And on completion, he sold it for 5,400 ludens.
He eventually ended the week with 7,400 ludens in the black.
As impressive as my kids’ experience was, it pales in comparison to the real world entrepreneurial adventures of Mikaila Ulmer.
Mikaila was just 4 when her family encouraged her to enter a couple of children’s business competitions — the Acton Children’s Business Fair, as well as Lemonade Day, in her hometown of Austin, Texas.
The budding, young entrepreneur, barely out of diapers, fused two ingredients from her life — painful experiences of being stung by bees twice, and her Great Granny Helen’s 1940’s special recipe for Flaxseed Lemonade.
Little Mikaila, who had transformed from fear of bees to fascination for the little insects, set about learning all she could about them. She discovered their crucial importance to the world food ecosystem. And she also learned about colony collapse disorder — the mysterious decline of bee populations worldwide.
To come up with a product to sell at the fairs, little Mikaila thought, “What if I make something that helps honeybees and uses my Great Granny Helen’s recipe?”
And that’s how Me & the Bees Lemonade was born — Great Granny Helen’s flaxseed recipe, sweetened with local honey. Today, following an $11 million deal, the award-winning Me & the Bees Lemonade has been buzzing off the shelves of Whole Foods Market, the world’s leading retailer of natural and organic foods.
The Great Disconnect
Numerous commentators and organizations have been lamenting what I term The Great Disconnect — the utter lack of real-world application for the work kids do in school. As Anastasia Basil put it eloquently in her article titled Dear School, Eff Your ‘F’,
“Your curriculum is bloated with minutiae — it’s designed for test-taking, not life beyond the classroom.”
We feed our kids into the K-16 school pipeline, hoping they would come out at the other end and land a job that would enable them to build a stable livelihood. This logic has been the unquestioned, dominant logic of modern society, and for a long time, it worked brilliantly.
Since the Great Recession, however, the wheels have come off that logic completely.
The Millenial Generation, you might call them The Unluckiest Generation, had the misfortune to exit the K-16 pipeline at just the same time the floor was falling off the global economy. They have had a horrid time getting good, stable, well-paying jobs. And even when they do, they are often considered overqualified and underemployed.
More than a decade since the Great Recession, the hope that this was just a temporary blip that would rebound once economic health returned has been dashed.
You see, most new jobs are created by startup businesses and as of 2014, even after return to economic growth, the rate of business startups had been the lowest in nearly 40 years. 3 million jobs were created by business startups in 2015, compared to 4.7 million jobs from similar business in 1999.
So you see, the jobs aren’t there, because there are not enough people creating them.
Our education system must prepare students for learning, work, and life after high school in a rapidly changing world, which means the time to provide real-world learning opportunities — for all students — is now.
- Aaron North, Vice President, Education, Kauffman Foundation
As parents of tweens and teens hurtling towards the ‘real world’, we can hope against the trends that things would return to the Golden Era of School to Jobs.
Or we can try something else.
No, not moan about how schools are not preparing our kids for the future.
No, not try to force schools to add entrepreneurship to the curriculum. (But of course it would be great if they do — and please keep trying if you are doing that).
No, when I mean take action, I mean become a kidpreneur parent coach and mentor your own kids towards entrepreneurship.
The Best Way To Predict The Future Is To Create It.
- Abe Lincoln
In the far distant past when family businesses where the dominant economic mode of production, kids were by default involved in economic production. Now they are so far removed from those. (For good reasons as society passed through the Industrial Age).
Now in the Digital Age, when machines do most of the arduous tasks, it is time to reconsider The Great Disconnect of kids from the ‘real world’.
There are many options available to parents to start introducing their kids to entrepreneurship. So many in fact that it can become bewildering as to how to start at all. So I will hold your hand and gently guide you with a few steps on how to get started.
Lemonade Stand Education, Homebrew-style
The essential job of the young adult is to create an identity. The job of the rest of one’s life is to inhabit it.
- Jacqueline Davies
1. Mindset
The very first place to start with is mind setting and habit-forming. Good news is kids haven’t lived long enough to calcify habits that will take years to unlearn. Bad news is that they have already laid down neural pathways that might compete with new learning approaches.
Most developmental psychologists believe that by age 14, humans have formed the complete shell of their identities and the rest of life is simply spent fleshing it out. Some even believe this happens much earlier at age 7.
For example, kids used to receiving allowances may struggle adapting to a different regime where they have to ‘work’ to earn money.
Irrespective of age however, neuroscience now demonstrates the incredible plasticity of the human brain — the ability of the brain to reshape itself to new experiences.
“What if I make something that helps honeybees and uses my Great Granny Helen’s recipe?”
Here are some of my recommendations to start the mind shift process, by making simple changes to home practices:
- Home Economics: Eliminate allowances (or don’t introduce them if you don’t have them already). Instead, establish a simple system for earning money at home. While an improvement over allowances, I wouldn’t recommend this be payment for chores. My preference would be earning for producing useful items for the home, like scented soap, fine dinner, summer mocktails for the barbeque.
- Books: While there is not an abundance of them (I know, I have been searching), there are a few great books to start introducing kids to entrepreneurship — mind you, they will struggle with pronouncing that word! For books that feature boy heroes and lawn mowing as a starter business, check out the 4-book Alfie Potts series by Mark Hibbitts and the 2-book Lawn Boy series by Gary Paulsen. For books with girl heroes and lemonade stands as a starter business, check out The Startup Squad by Brian Weisfeld and Nicole C Kear, and The Lemonade War by Jacqueline Davies.
- Games: Playing family board games is also an excellent way to start getting kids into the entrepreneurial mindset. The quintessential board game for this is obviously Monopoly, which also has a Junior version for younger kids. But a couple of others warrant mention — The Game of Life (also with a Junior version) and Welcome to Centerville. And of course, if you allow digital gaming for your kids, there are a panoply of business simulation and tycoon-style games, such as Railroad Tycoon.
Historically, the family has played the primary role in educating children for life, with the school providing supplemental scaffolding to the family.
- Stephen Covey
2. Structured Programs
- Hands-off @Home: As I described in my opening, Outschool offers a number of online classes on business and entrepreneurship, led by educators teaching subjects and interests that they are passionate about. One of the great things about this is that from the comfort of their home, your kids can interact with other kids around the world pursuing the same interest.
- Hands-on @Home: If you do want to deliver a structured entrepreneurial education program to your kids, you can, of course, create your own curriculum. For years I tried, and failed, to do just that — I wouldn’t recommend it! Luckily, you can avail of a free, full-featured curriculum — a course in a box! — VentureLab, developed by Luz-Cristal Sanchez Glangchai. If you do decide to use that resource, may I suggest you also pay it forward by making a donation.
- In-school: If you happen to be in a school that offers entrepreneurial education — congratulations! If you don’t, perhaps you might consider connecting with other parents that might be interested and pushing for one. My recommendations would be NFTE and programs by uncharted learning.
Practice makes better.
- (I thought I had coined that, but apparently it was also spoken by Judy Q, a 3rd grade teacher!)
3. ‘Real World’ Practice
Having juiced your kids all up on lemonade, and they are fizzing with all that sugar and entrepreneurial energy, I would greatly recommend providing a ‘real world’, or close to one, outlet for them.
- Online: You can work with your kids to set up an online business, for example, a scented soap business on Etsy. You can see some examples of kids doing just that at The Startup Squad business contest. If you have a daughter between 7–14 years old, you might consider entering her — but hurry if you decide to do so. (Your boys can content themselves with a neighborhood lawn mowing service).
- In-school: Encourage your school to run a Junior Entrepreneur Showcase Day, or something similar.
- In-community: Alternatively, you could organize to run an Acton Children’s Business Fair, or a Lemonade Day. Or you can run an original junior entrepreneur fair, jointly developed with your kids. After all, isn’t that what entrepreneurship is all about!
If you do choose to go down this path with your kids, please do write and let me know how youse get on…
At my lemonade stand I used to give the first glass away free and charge five dollars for the second glass. The refill contained the antidote.
- Emo Philips
Update (25 Sep 2021): PlayWorx is currently on sabbatical.
At present, I am blogging exclusively at The Global Careerist.
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If you are a parent of a t(w)een, I invite you to subscribe to my weekly PlayWorx Insights email and join other perceptive parents who are already benefiting from this ‘front-side seat’ into another way to grow t(w)eens!
I champion parents of t(w)eens to become intentional in nurturing them as Imagineers, enabling them engineer their imaginative and creative ideas into productive and practical forms, thus empowering them to masterfully navigate and thrive in an Age of Massive Disruption.
I do this by writing a Medium publication, speaking at events and cooking up ingenious ways to spread the PlayWorx Method message of emphasizing nurturing of bold imagination and building of sustained creative capital during the t(w)eens years.
If you are a parent of a t(w)een, I invite you to subscribe to my weekly PlayWorx Insights email and join other perceptive parents who are already benefiting from this ‘front-side seat’ into another way to grow t(w)eens!
