3 Tips for Raising an Entrepreneur

If you're looking to make your child highly employable in the years to come, you want him to have a resume that screams "entrepreneur." "When you look at the statistics, one in three employers are seeking people with entrepreneurial experience,” says Monroe Blakes, vice president of marketing for the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship. Here are a few suggestions to get you off on the right foot:  

1. Encourage Problem-Solving

“Entrepreneurs are people who don’t just take the solution that’s handed to them, but create a solution,” says Alexandra Samuel, author of “Work Smarter with Social Media.” So the next time your kid presents a problem, Samuel suggests asking how he or she would solve it and then helping them brainstorm how the solutions could turn into business opportunities. In addition to solving their own problems, get them to think about problems in their community and in other parts of the world. To learn how the world operates, Blakes suggests reading the newspaper with them, finding the problems and, again, talking through the potential solutions.

2. Emphasize “Effort Out, Money In”

Do you have a nickel-and-dimer on your hands? In other words, does your kid try to put a price on every family request? If so, don’t necessarily discourage it. Samuel says you could have a future CFO on your hands. “As exasperating as it can be, and it can be, it’s also good for your kid to understand the lesson of effort out, money in,” she says. Even better, use these opportunities to teach them how to negotiate — especially if you have a daughter. (New data from Glassdoor shows 68 percent of women accepted the salary they were offered and didn’t counter, compared with 52 percent of men).

3. Have Money Conversations Often

If you have a kid who is naturally interested in money, that’s fantastic, but if you don’t, then it becomes all the more important to try to raise the level of interest — again, especially with your daughters. Research shows that parents can subconsciously socialize their children by making gender-based distinctions when choosing which money topics to talk about. Boys are more likely to get the borrowing, budgeting and savings talks, while girls receive lectures on spending, checking accounts and overall family finances. “Another thing the girls get talked to about a lot more about than boys is philanthropy,” says Ron Lieber, author of “The Opposite of Spoiled” and a recent guest on HerMoney. “So you’re talking to the girls about giving it away as opposed to earning it or spending it or investing it.”

With Kelly Hultgren