Parenting - Helping Your Kids Decide on Their Business
When the boys told me they wanted to be entrepreneurs, my first instinct was mowing lawns or shoveling snow. I figured manual labor would be the obvious choice. It’s not complicated and would teach them the benefits of hard work and a job well done.
However, their timeline was much more accelerated than mine. I figured they would be old enough by the age of 12. I found out they were thinking much sooner than that - like now. This era of kids are motivated by YouTube and it’s ability to transform their imagination into live content for their own channel.
I had no idea that my boys were thinking about creating their own YouTube channel. When they approached me with the concept of opening packs of cards on YouTube, I was hesitant at best. I felt like they would be opening up themselves to criticism at such a young age and that could be detrimental to their mental/emotional health.
It didn't take long for them to convince me, though. After I watched their first episode, I noticed how excited and happy they seemed to be on camera. It’s not something that I’m good at, so I thought, “How good could they possibly be?” Link to Zach & Cooper's YouTube Channel
Parenting Lesson: Embrace your kids strengths and weaknesses
It doesn't matter what they’re good or bad at - all that matters is that you give them the courage to make mistakes and learn from them. If all they care about is becoming a younger version of you, they will never grow into the person they were meant to be.
Your ego is the enemy to your child. Embrace your child for everything they are and want to be, not who you want them to be, and that will give them the best chance to be happy.
The worst thing you can do is attempt to make them the person you wish you would have become. Many athletes learn at an advanced age how they could have performed better if they were focused when they were young - practiced more often, trained longer, worked harder. They then attempt to train their child in a way they think would have led to their own success. The reality is they got to be who they wanted to be when they were young. They paid the consequences later, and now they are blind to the fact that their child is now paying the consequences for their regrets.
When you’re deciding on what kind of company your kids can run, the first thing you need to figure out is what will make THEM happy...not you. We’re embarking on this journey and I’m well aware that we will have setbacks. But no setback would be worse than if we don’t try and learn from the experience.