Raising Entrepreneurs

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If you’re in the part of the world that’s heading into gift-giving season at a frightening pace, you’ll probably be thinking about gifts for your young entrepreneurs.

If you don’t want to give them yet another time-wasting computer or Play Station game, here’s an assortment of business-related gifts that I’ve come across in the past couple of weeks.

Teach them how to manage all that money they are earning with a four-compartment money box. One compartment for spending, one for saving, one for investing, and one for giving.

Upgrade them to a full version of a piece of software they have been using, like Dreamweaver, Wordtracker, or NicheBot.

Get them their very own web site, all set up and ready to go - SiteBuildIt! is having a 2-for1 Christmas sale.

Subscribe them to a Private Label Rights website to help them build content faster - some of these subscriptions are even free! Have a look at all the giveaways at Resell Rights For Newbies, for example.

Purchase them tickets to a seminar about their chosen business.

Buy a DVD set about their chosen business (one of my 11-year-olds has an eBay store, and she will actually watch a talking head for 25 minutes at a stretch, but only if it’s talking about eBay! Her favorite is Derek Gehl’s “Insider Secrets to Selling on eBay”.)

The most important gift you can give as a parent, though, is the gift of your time and attention.

Give a gift voucher for a weekly one-on-one get together, or a fortnightly one, good for the whole of 2008. Spend that time learning more about what makes your young entrepreneur tick. What are their likes and dislikes, their ambitions and their fears? Where do they need help dealing with the challenges of growing up?

In years to come, whether they are hugely financially successful or simply muddling through, those times will be the times they remember.

In our busy, ever-changing, competitive, interrupt-driven, attention-starved culture, the act of carving out time specifically to spend with one other person is the single greatest demonstration of love one can make.

And at the end of the day, that’s what your young entrepreneurs need most from you - to know that you love them enough to make them a priority in your life.