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Raising Little Entrepreneurs: Including Kids in Work-From-Home Tasks
As someone who has worked from home for over two decades while raising kids, I can tell you that your kids love to be involved with whatever you are doing — from normal chores like folding laundry to daily tasks like work meetings. Your kids love spending that time with you, and they are like little sponges, soaking up everything!
Sometimes it can be difficult to balance work and your kiddos, but that is why I recommend making them part of your workday schedule! They can lend a hand while also learning valuable skills. For example, when my kids were toddlers I asked them to neatly stack papers for me. If there were other days where they wanted something a little more active, I set them up with their very own “office” with a small desk, some simple materials like papers and highlighters, an old keyboard, and told them to run their own business. It was absolutely adorable, and I noticed how quickly they picked up things like noon meant they were going to “step away from their desk” for lunch or how to handle phone calls…even if they completely made up the phone calls themselves! This also encouraged their imagination, which is so important for young children.
As my kids got older, the tasks they could do to help offered more responsibility. For example, I would have them count out items such as envelopes into stacks of twenty-five and add up the stacks to ensure we had the correct amount of envelopes for mailings. I would also let them seal envelopes and put stamps on them. Some of our favorite memories include beautiful spring days when we all walked to the mailbox together after all that work.
Once they were in the pre-teen stage, I even let them answer the phone. They learned invaluable skills on how to answer the phone, talk to people of all different backgrounds, and how to socialize professionally. When my kids grew out of that stage, I’m not sure who missed them more, myself or my clients who got a kick out of interacting with them!
Not only can your kiddos really help you with your work, they can learn skills that will benefit them for the rest of their lives, all the while creating fun memories with their parents. If you want to start including your children in your daily work from home routine, here are a few skills you can pass onto them:
Teaching Time Management
Give your kiddos their own deadlines to complete tasks. If you need twenty five paper clips for paperwork, tell your children to count out the paperclips by the end of the day. If you have very young children who are just learning the clock, ask them to be your personal alarm clock and alert you during certain times of the day; this will help them tell time while also keeping you on track for lunch breaks, snack breaks, and more.
Enhancing Communication Skills Through Business Calls
Yes, I have let my kids answer the phone for work, and yes sometimes we had some hilarious mishaps. However, clients and myself alike always enjoyed the experience. Teach your kids what to do if a phone call drops, if it is hard to hear someone on the other end of the line, and how to place calls themselves to others. If you mostly do online video calls, you can also have your kiddo help you login to those calls so they can get used to working on the computer with popular programs like Zoom or Google Meet.
Imparting Basic Finance Knowledge with Invoicing Tasks
Back in the day when paper invoices were more common, I would print off a list of customers and hand that to my kiddos as well as a stack of invoices. Their job was to make sure that I had printed off invoices for everyone on that list. This taught basic organizational and cross-referencing skills while also letting them see how invoices were set up. As teens, they helped me with the bookkeeping by inputting vendor invoices into our system which was just taking a paper invoice and typing in the due date and amount. I would check this at the end of everyday to make sure totals matched; this sort of experience was extremely helpful for my kids!
Celebrating Successes to Foster a Growth Mindset
The big thing to remember here is that your kids need to be rewarded when they do good at the tasks you include them in! This does not have to be complicated — you can simply praise your child for their good job. Don’t forget to pay them somehow; when my kids were really little they just liked working with me, but as they got older I found ways to pay them back for their help. As toddlers we had a points system in place that would allow them to pick out a toy from a magazine. As little kids they received a dollar for just about everything they did. As teenagers they were paid a small wage. This passes on the value of hardwork, but we were also sure to add in bonuses for a job well done such as surprise pizza parties with friends when they were younger or a cash bonus for the teenagers.
My children are now all grown and are very hard workers. We did our best to set them up with skills they would need for the future, and we often saw this advantage at play when the kids started at their entry level jobs and some of their coworkers were unsure of how to do basic tasks because they were not familiar with them. I highly recommend finding some way to include your children in your work in every stage of their lives to foster valuable skills and also create lasting memories.