5 parenting tips for raising resilient, self-reliant kids

Tameka Montgomery is a mother and business owner.

For more than 20 years her work was centered around supporting adult entrepreneurs.
Providing them with training and technical assistance and resources to help them start and grow
their business.

How do we raise self-reliant kids who have initiative, who are resilient and who could be
problem solvers?

Kids who have the skills and the courage to step outside of their comfort zone and take
advantage of what life has to offer.

Usually as a parent, we want our kids to be happy and successful. So, our instinct is to shield
them from hurt and disappointment. We worry about their self-esteem, so we praise them for
everything. We are concerned about whether or not they fit in, so we indulge them. And we do
all of this in an attempt to curate a perfect life for them.

But what we’re really doing is raising kids who are afraid to take risks because they fear failure,
kids with lack of confidence in their ability to figure things out and then young people who are
afraid to launch into adulthood.

More young adults are living at home and for longer stretches.

A Pew research study found that 52% of young adults are stuck between adolescence and adult
hood.

She believes we do that by raising kids who have the opportunity or have the skill set to view
the world from an entrepreneurial mindset.

Being entrepreneurial is not genetic. It is a set behavior that can be learned when given the
opportunity. Entrepreneurs are not born.

The skills and the experiences that cause a person to be entrepreneurial can be taught and they
can be nurtured.

Now raising entrepreneurial kids is more than just teaching them how to start a business so they
can earn money. Raising entrepreneurial kids is really about preparing kids for life. Equipping
them with everything that they need with confidence, with the ability to speak, to persevere to
have tenacity, to bounce back from fear and rejection.

Those are the things that are required in our world to live to one’s potential.

In order to learn as much as she could about raising entrepreneurial kids, she interviewed
dozens of parents and kids to find out what they were doing.
1. Don’t give them an allowance

Challenge them to start a business or a job to earn their spending money. There is no
better lesson around the value of a dollar than when you have to work hard to earn one
of them. And through this process our kids will learn confidence, financial literacy, public
speaking, how to convince people, all skills that are valuable for the world that we live
in.

2. Make them pay for their wants

Ex: Daddy dollar

The boys would earn daddy dollars for doing things such as chores, for exhibiting
positive behavior and also read books

3. Reduce their prosperity.

Kids today have a lot of stuff.

But when we chose a parenting style of overindulging our children by providing them
with too much, too soon, for too long, with no effort on their part what we do is to raise
young people who are self-centered and entitled.

If our kids never want for anything what’s going to motivate them to take actions?

4. Let them be delight-directed

Entrepreneurs are lifelong learners.

They learn to do not simply to know.

When we encourage our children to seek out learning for the things that they are most
interested in, they become learners who seek to learn to do.

Ex delight is drawing

5. Let them solve their problems.

Entrepreneurs are problems solvers.

The potential to discover new things about themselves new capacities that they might
have, the ability to go out and find the answer for themselves.

Kids need to learn how to think lie a entrepreneur.

The sooner we do this as parents, create an environment at home where they have the
opportunity and multiple occasions to challenge their beliefs about what’s possible
within them to step outside of their comfort zone, to take risk, to learn from failure, to
bounce back from rejection, then sooner we’ll put them on the path of living out their
potential to lead very fulfilling and successful lives.