Entrepreneurship Activities for Kids

A real small venture teaches costing, failure and customers faster than any lesson about business. The rule that makes it work is the one adults find hardest: you may not do the difficult parts for them.

What makes it real

Three conditions. Real money, however little. Real customers who are not obliged to buy. And a genuine possibility of losing.

A stall where relatives buy everything out of kindness teaches nothing, and children know it is happening.

Seven to nine: the simplest version

A stall. Lemonade, biscuits, bracelets, plants grown from cuttings. The learning is in the parts adults usually take over: working out what the ingredients cost, deciding a price, and discovering afterwards whether they made or lost money.

Do the arithmetic with them at the end, honestly, including when the answer is that they lost two pounds.

Nine to eleven: a service

Washing cars, walking a neighbour's dog, weeding, packing shopping. Services teach pricing your time, which is a harder and more useful idea than pricing an object.

Also teaches turning up when you do not feel like it, which is most of what running anything consists of.

Eleven to fourteen: making something people actually want

Baked goods to order. Repairing or reselling. Something they design and produce. This is where the interesting failure happens: making twenty of something nobody wanted.

Introduce the idea of asking first. Would you buy this, and at what price, before making any of it.

Fourteen and up: the real thing

Tutoring, a market stall, something online, a small commission. Real customers, real accounts, real complaints. At this age it can genuinely be theirs.

The concepts, in the order they arrive

Cost and price are different, and the gap is the profit. Children routinely price below cost until they have done the sum once.

Somebody has to want it. The commonest lesson, learned by making something nobody buys.

Your time is worth something. Arrives with services.

Reputation compounds. The second dog walk comes from doing the first one properly.

The rules for the adult

Do not fund losses. Do not buy the stock out of pity. Do not take over when it is going badly. Do not tidy their pricing. Answer questions and no more.

A venture rescued by a parent is a lesson in being rescued.

What it is actually for

Not producing a young entrepreneur. It is one of the few available situations where a child experiences the whole loop, deciding, doing, being judged by reality, and adjusting, with stakes small enough to be safe.

The failure is the most valuable part, which is why it must be allowed to happen.