Teach Boys by Giving Them a Lemonade Stand

How to help your kids throw a lemonade stand and teach them valuable lessons at the same time.

At some point if your child asks to have a lemonade stand so that they can make money, don’t miss a learning-packed opportunity for your them. A lemonade stand is a junior version of a complete business and brings together many elements of life as educational opportunities.

It’s so good for education in fact; even if your child never actually asks you to have one, suggest it to them! This is a chance to show your leadership qualities as a teacher and mentor to your child.

Suggest it not just to get them outside of the house on a lazy weekend afternoon, but to give them the said opportunities to learn and spend time with them in the process. But don’t spend too much time, if they are old enough, since letting them run it themselves and will teach independence.

Learning Responsibility, Sales and Due Diligence

Start off by making your child earn the right to even have the event happen in the first place. Just because their friend had one, it doesn’t mean they should be able to do just go out and do it. Planning and promotional activities are required. Who knows, this could be the start of a sales and marketing or other kind of business career.

Teach them responsibility, ethics and business by making them propose to you (even in writing if you want) about how they plan on doing the lemonade stand. The plan should cover the “who what where when and why”, concerns they have, or speculations about bad situations that will arise, safety concerns, and profit-sharing plans with friends.

When they submit this to you, which will be their first and hopefully not last business plan in life, it will give you a good gauge of how well they’ve thought the idea through, and what, as their parent that you will need to teach them additionally.

In the end, you are agreeing to let your child have the stand and are allowing them use all your materials. They could even buy the lemonade / materials off of you for a very low price just for the sake of teaching about how a real profit is made in real life (and that businesses aren’t run by mommy and daddy’s free things). Only after you have made them think it through, research it, and proved themselves of it, then you should let them do it.

Teach a Little Math

No matter a child’s age or math skills, if they want to have a lemonade stand, there is some math that they can be learned, even algebra. When it comes to learning math, “whatever works” is the advice of mathematics author Danica McKellar.

Help your child determine the cost of materials of goods sold, or price points for selling the lemonade, or break down for the them how much money they should be able to expect to make by sell selling a given amount.

Teach About Money

Tie-in math exercises naturally with lessons on sharing and ethics: Ask your child, if they intend to work alongside a friend or a sibling, how they plan to split profits and how that is done if they don’t know the math.

And ask them what their intended plan to do with splitting tips is. Many adults give tips to children running a lemonade stand. Let your child know that they and their partner should have a plan beforehand whether or not a tip is to be kept by the individual or split with everyone else and how-so.

At the end of the lemonade stand, you can use it as yet another opportunity, to teach the child about money.

Maybe make the children pay you a tiny cut you can save for them, to show them how rent for the “real estate” would have worked.

Get them thinking about investing early on. Some kids can easily make a substantial sum of money with a lemonade stand. Before they want to blow the money, ask them what was missing that could have made the lemonade stand better that they could spend it on. Teach them the difference between spending, saving, and investing, as you can’t count on their school to do so.

Teach Safety

Make your child outline their concerns for how the stand will be a safe one to get them used to thinking in that manner, fill them in after what they forgot after complimenting them on what they did correctly.

The main concern in a lemonade stand for your child will be where the stand is set up relative to the road, and setting up special rules related as such. There should be also be rules about how to approach cars, like waiting for them to stop f first, and never stepping out into the street to address anyone unless you decide it’s okay for them to do so.