How To Empower Your Kids To Lead

As parents, we’re sure you already know that it’s important to set your children up for success in every way you can. 

We set our children up for financial success by starting savings plans on their behalf at a young age and we set them up for educational success by enrolling them in classes outside of their average school day to broaden their horizons beyond the valuable information they learn in their classrooms. 

What we need to be paying more attention to, however, is setting our children up for success as leaders. Without knowing the person reading this blog right now personally, we can be sure that you’ve never told your child they should aim to follow the crowd. Instead, we are certain you, and every other parent on the planet, want your child to be successful as a trendsetter… a forerunner… a leader.

Go ahead… tell us we’re wrong. We dare you!

Admit it… we’re right, aren’t we? 

Anyways, we know how important it is for kids to obtain the proper foundation required to become effective leaders in the future so this blog will set out to give you a few tips on how to empower your kids to lead. 

1. Give Children Responsibilities

An easy but effective way to empower your child to lead is by giving them responsibilities around the house. The most effective leaders know how to take charge when necessary and the first step to encouraging such behaviour is allowing your children to feel a sense of responsibility – maybe with taking out the garbage, helping fold clothes or not forgetting to feed the family pet. Giving your child a consistent responsibility around the house will empower them to lead because they feel a sense of accomplishment and pride when carrying through with even a simple household task. 

2. Involve Children in Family Decisions

One big principle of leadership is decision making. Leaders tend to be the ones that make decisions about how to delegate responsibilities amongst a team, for instance. Help foster that decision-making aptitude in your child by involving them in simple family decisions like what cereal to buy at the grocery store or more complex choices like where to go on vacation as a way to empower your children towards developing a skill that will become crucial for them as our next generation of leaders. 

3. Support/Guide/Reassure Children Through Their Mistakes

No one becomes an effective leader right away. Even the best leaders make mistakes, and being able to support and guide your children as they make mistakes in life is a profound way to empower your kids to lead because it helps reassure them that mistakes are okay. This will help your child build their confidence and understanding that leadership is not a perfect art and help them realize that making mistakes is actually an important part of eventually becoming a great forward-thinking leader in the future. 

Leadership is a crucial part of any child… well, any person’s… development. We sincerely believe that the tips we’ve just outlined, if shared with your kid, will give your child the stepping stones they need to become an effective and powerful leader both now and in the future.

No matter whether we look through the lens of business, sport, media or any other lens, leadership and the foundation of skills that foster effective leaders are beneficial for any child to maximize their potential. 

One example of an increasingly popular lens through which leadership may soon become more important than ever is entrepreneurship. We don’t know about you but we firmly believe that more and more kids will become compelled to explore entrepreneurship as they grow older. 

If you believe, like we do, in the trajectory of entrepreneurship today, we encourage you to sign your child up for one of Explorer Hop's entrepreneurship programs to give them a way to apply some of the leadership principles we’ve outlined here and apply them in a real-life context that will give them a leg-up in the future. 

Our entrepreneurship programs have helped launch over 40 kid-businesses that have raised $45,000 for various charities over time, all while providing program participants with essential knowledge and experience to mold them into our next great young entrepreneurs through leadership.