I remember being told to walk out
in the middle of a street in Banff, Alberta because I'd thrown a penny out in
the street, and my dad said, "Go pick it up." He said, "I work
too damn hard for my money. I'm not going to see you ever waste a penny."
And I remember that lesson to this day. Allowances teach kids the wrong habits.
Allowances, by nature, are teaching kids to think about a job. An entrepreneur
doesn't expect a regular paycheck. Allowance is breeding kids at a young age to
expect a regular paycheck. That's wrong, for me, if you want to raise
entrepreneurs. What I do with my kids now -- I've got two, nine and seven -- is
I teach them to walk around the house and the yard, looking for stuff that
needs to get done. Come to me and tell me what it is. Or I'll come to them and
say, "Here's what I need done." And then you know what we do? We
negotiate. They go around looking for what it is. But then we negotiate on what
they're going to get paid. And then they don't have a regular check, but they
have more opportunities to find more stuff, and they learn the skill of
negotiating, and they learn the skill of finding opportunities as well. You
breed that kind of stuff ( raising children).
Each of my kids has two piggy
banks. Fifty percent of all the money that they earn or get gifted, percent goes in their house account, percent goes in their toy account. Anything
in their toy account they can spend on whatever they want. The percent that goes in their house account,
every six months, goes to the bank. They walk up with me. Every year all the
money in the bank goes to their broker. Both my nine- and seven-year-olds have
a stock broker already. But I'm teaching them to force that savings habit. It
drives me crazy that kids are saying, "Maybe I'll start contributing to my
RSP now." What?, you've missed
years. You can teach those habits to young kids when they don't even
feel the pain yet. Don't read them bedtime stories every night. Maybe four
nights out of the week read them bedtime stories and three nights of the week
have them tell stories. Why don't you sit down with kids and give them four
items, a red shirt, a blue tie, a kangaroo and a laptop, and have them tell a
story about those four things? My kids do that all the time. It teaches them to
sell; it teaches them creativity; it teaches them to think on their feet. Just
do that kind of stuff and have fun with it ( raising children).
Get kids to stand up in front of groups and
talk, even if it's just stand up in front of their friends and do plays and
have speeches. Those are entrepreneurial traits that you want to be nurturing.
Show the kids what bad customers or bad employees look like. Show them the
grumpy employees. When you see grumpy customer service, point that out to them.
Say, "By the way, that guy's a crappy employee." And say, "These
ones are good ones." If you go into a restaurant and you have bad customer
service, show them what bad customer service looks like. We have all these
lessons in front of us, but we don't take those opportunities; we teach kids to
go get a tutor.
Imagine if you actually took all
the kids' junk that's in the house right now, all the toys that they've
outgrown two years ago and said, "Why don't we start selling some of this
on Craigslist and Kijiji?" And they can actually sell it and learn how to find
scammers when they get email offers come in. They can come into your account or
a sub account or whatever. But teach them how to fix the price, guess the
price, pull up the photos ( raising children).
This is Adam Norman, a 30-year-old father and a journalist. I consider being a father as my full-time duty, which comes before my actual job of journalism. As a father, there will always be new challenges for me to face everyday while raising my kids. This is where the idea of this website came from. I wanted to give out my experience, along with the experience of others, to all parents out there who need an advice with raising their kids.
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