Teach Your Children Well

Or give them a permanent card at the bank of Mum and Dad

Imagine if your kid had their first business at the age of 8, had a business plan and was ready for expansion at the age of 11, and still had time to be a kid, study, have mates, and have a solid future that could go in any direction they chose. I’m here to tell you they can.

Sometimes I feel our schools are so much better at educating for the real world than they were in my day. I remember a great book I read in my 20s and wondering why schools in the Kiwi world of Number 8 fencing wire, didn’t teach kids how to innovate.

I didn’t study the leading lights of New Zealand inventors and scientists until well after high school, in fact really until I started working for one, Angus Tait. This book below was one of the dozens that taught me so much in my 20s and one of a number based on what they didn’t teach you in even higher institutions outside of the new spate of MBAs.

Today, I still hear kids saying that school isn’t teaching them what they need to know to be successful. There are daily newspaper articles about this around the world. Who teaches us to teach our kids how to be successful, if we haven’t been taught, or haven’t figured it out, how are we going to pass those skills on as parents? I didn’t learn from my parents. They were terrible with money. We ate meat on payday and substituted it with eggs and cheese at the end of the pay week.

We should all be taught how to be great problem solvers and to create successful opportunities, without being in the category that organizations like the Chambers of Commerce teach, such as 20% of businesses fail in the first year. It gets worse after that. Kids are smart and great problem solvers, but most adults, including many teachers, struggle with the concept that sometimes a child’s ideas might be better than theirs.

When I was a kid, we had very little of anything. My parents didn’t own a house. We didn’t even have a TV until around 1970, and it was a black and white 12” Dominion TV rental set, in a cubbyhole in the kitchen. I learned early on that if I wanted to buy anything, I would have to make it happen for myself.

I was pretty entrepreneurial at an early age and tried some things. But I could have used some help and advice. We didn’t have YouTube or online courses in those days. The only things online were our washing and the landline phone which was a ‘party line’ where the neighbors could listen into your conversation and know your business.

Lukas and Tanya Chapple, friends of mine from down the line have come up with a course for parents to teach their kids how to get into business at an early age. I wish this had been around when I was a kid! Check this out.

When I was 9, we had a lot of fruit trees around our Titirangi house, and after school and on the holidays in the hot summer, I made lemonade and tried selling glasses of cool iced drinks to people walking up the street from a table at the top of our driveway.

I sold a few, but there was a boy over the road, the son of a prominent local, who lived about 30 meters across the road and was a few years older than me. A bully. Whenever he saw me out there trying to earn some pocket money, he would come over, give me a couple of thumps, and yell at me with spittle coming out of his mouth for good measure, tip my little trestle table up, spilling the drinks and smashing my mother’s drinking glasses.

Image by Mary Bettini Blank from Pixabay

When I was 10 my father bought me the next-door neighbor’s kid’s rusty old bike, which they re-painted for me. It had no gears, the chain kept falling off and I remember watching the next-door neighbor paint it just before Christmas, thinking some sucker is going to get that for Christmas, never for a minute thinking that sucker would be me.

It was! I got the bike and I signed as a delivery boy for the Auckland Star, Auckland’s evening newspaper.

My paper run included some of the steepest, winding streets in Titirangi. I had a green canvas bag that rubbed against the spokes of my bike on the downhills, making a cool putting noise. I would pretend I was riding a motorbike. I would often have to walk and push the bike going up the hills. Sometimes the chain would come off, of course, this would happen when I was going downhill in the rain. There was no hand break. The bike relied on a mechanism that only worked when the chain was on, so ‘Look ma, no brakes!’ Then I would have dirty, oily hands, and try and wash them on the leafy scrub on the side of the roads.

The best part of the job was that every 8 weeks I had to go and collect cash from my ‘customers’ for their newspaper subscriptions. The pay wasn’t great, but the tips were because they knew I had to work pretty hard to get their news to them safe and dry.

One day I was coming down a steep concrete drive on my bike, and the chain came off, which meant I had no brakes. My bike got hit by a slow-moving car going one way, then I got straightened up when a car coming the other way also hit me. I went straight over the other side of the road (maybe that’s why there is a fence now), and I went flying over the footpath. I landed on the top of a palm tree about 5 feet above the steeply sloping bank and my bike went a little farther with the spokes getting tangled in the bush. To my relief and that of the small crowd of people who emerged from their cars, I only had grazes and bruises, but the bike had to be walked home.

Google Streetview

Anyway, like a lot of people, I tried to compensate my kids for what I didn’t have. They have great work ethics and learned how to be able to afford want they want or need, but for a time, their concept of money was of a never-ending supply of bank notes that came out of a hole in the wall whenever you needed more.

Remember this song? Such a great song back in 1970. The message is just as true today as it was back then.

We need to teach our children well. The future is going to be an exciting and for many, a rough road. They will need to learn to live in a complex and ambiguous environment. They are inheriting a bit of a mess, to be fair. Manmade climate change, wars, and new technologies are developing faster than we can comprehend the consequences, good and bad.

IMHO, our country, and many countries around the world need to learn not only to live sustainably but also self-sufficiently. We still import too many products we could produce ourselves. Just take one example. We love our cars and petrol. We decided in New Zealand to no longer refine oil, so have to import all of our fuels in a processed state. If Russia's war on Ukraine continues and OPEC reduces production, how high on the priority list for the supply of petrol and diesel will New Zealand rank? We’ve known this since WWII, but we haven’t done anything about it.

If the northern hemisphere decided to bring the Doomsday Clock forward, I think New Zealand has a great chance for survival, one of the best in the world. But we will need to work hard to adapt to being self-sufficient. What better way than to teach our kids the necessary skills, starting with an understanding of how business works and how to solve problems?

Back on a positive note, there are people doing this now. If you have kids and want a place to start, anywhere in the world, check out this awesome brand-new course that Lukas and Tanya Chapple have set up on Udemy. They have spent the last year creating it and it is educational and entertaining and you and your child can enjoy doing it together. Hey, you might even learn a thing or two yourself.

Need to know more? Check out the bios of your instructors: