Entrepreneurship and parenting

I have been working on several posts on entrepreneurship and realized that there is a direct connection to parenting that I want to draw out:

Parents prepare their children, for better or for worse, to be members of society. They nurture their children spiritually, intellectually, socially and emotionally (and in other ways) to enable them to participate in human society. One of the ways that those children will, or at least should, participate in society is by working.

When I lived in Uganda, East Africa, I was introduced to two helpful ways of describing students: job-creators and job-seekers. The people in the village where I lived had begun to realize that the schools prepared students only to be job-seekers. Since the town was "in the bush" and the economy was almost entirely agricultural, there was very little commercial activity. Consequently, everyone who became 'educated' had to leave to find work. By contrast, there were a few Ugandans, whom I was privileged to know, who were job-creators; they were entrepreneurs. They saw opportunities, and took them - and created opportunities, jobs, capital, wealth and income for themselves and others.

I thought of job-creators and job-seekers as African descriptors (since I first encountered them there), until I returned to the United States and realized that those descriptors were very helpful in looking at students here: and by and large, they are job-seekers. While the American economic system thrives on entrepreneurship, surprisingly its educational system does not, in my opinion, intentionally shape students who think and act entrepreneurially.

So now as a parent and entrepreneur, I want to intentionally nurture my children to be job-creators. Another way to say it is that I want to raise my children to be critical thinkers and creative problem solvers who enrich their communities by using their God-given abilities to participate in and create meaningful work that benefits the community and provides a foretaste of the Kingdom of God.

If I prepare my children merely to take existing jobs that have been crafted by others, there will be at least two consequences:

1. They will likely not use their God-given creativity to the extent that He has ordained and designed.
2. They will, by virtue of being employees, need to submit (at least to a certain extent) to the vision and mission of their employer.

That is emphatically not to say that there is not dignity in working for others; I believe that there is. Nor am I denying that in the best businesses, employees are encouraged to be creative, and to contribute to the vision of the organization. What I am saying is that there need to be more businesses and organizations that creatively address needs, solve problems, and encourage their employees to do the same.

That is the kind of entrepreneur I aspire to be, and the kind of outlook that I long for my children to have as they prepare for, and participate in the world of work.