UPDATED: July 26, 2021

One of the most effective ways to teach your little ones about handling money is to let them know how to earn their own money. It helps your kids as well to know different ways to make money without depending solely on you for small expenses like buying things and participating in fun activities or workshops with their friends.

On the other hand, it can also help you, as a parent, to alleviate the financial strain since you no longer need to give them pocket money for buying some minor things because they can already buy it on their own. Hence, in this way, you help your kids to develop their confidence and enhance their skills in planning, thinking, calculating, and selling. 

Make sure that the job your kids will do will not compromise their safety, health, and well-being. Therefore, you may guide them at first how the job works, and then once they already have the gist how the job should be done, you may now let your kids do their own.

Hence, listed below are the jobs your kids can do to earn money, especially this coming summer season.

How Can Kids Make Money?

At first, you might be hesitating, if there is a job a kid can do to earn money. However, as you read some articles on your browser, you are convinced that there are certain jobs suited for your little one and they can make money out of it. Some of the jobs include the following:

Lemonade Stand

Oh well, lemonade stands are surely one of the most common entrepreneurship ideas your kids can do, especially during hot summer days. In this way, it will enhance your kid’s selling skills and they will know how they should be paid for a single cup of juice they make. Thus, it will improve their mathematical skills through giving change and boost their confidence around people since they get the opportunity to talk with their customers.

Make sure to place the stand on a busy street so that your kid will generate a lot of potential buyers, aside from your neighbors. 

Pet Sitting And Other Neighborhood Services

This is another great job that kids can do to make extra money. Some of your neighbors will be out of town during summer and they will be looking for someone who can take care of their pets or to look for their house while they are away. Therefore, your kid’s responsibility is just to stop by your neighbor’s house to feed or walk their pets a few times a day. 

Your kids can also offer simple tasks such as watering the plants and bringing in the newspaper while the families are away. Just make sure you have trained your child about some tips on how to do the task right. Also, you can make them a price list for easy marketing and negotiating with the people around your neighborhood.

Other neighborhood services include:

  • House cleaning
  • Lawn mowing
  • Car washing

Selling Homemade Crafts

This is perfect for your kids who are naturally creative and artistic. You may encourage them to watch Youtube tutorials to get some ideas and styles on how to make DIY crafts such as earrings, bracelets, home decors, and other decorative stuff that are easy and fun to make with. Let them be involved in the process of procuring raw materials, so that they will know the basics about capital and the estimated profit they will generate in making a product to sell.

So, once you have created enough of these, you may sell them online such as on Marketplace on your social media account and on Etsy. You may also sell them at your local craft fair or within your neighborhood. 

Garage Sale

Most of your kids' old stuff was already outgrown that you must need to declutter. Have your kids go to their closet and make them decide, what are the items such as clothes, toys, shoes, and bags they no longer use and need. Once they have sorted it out, plan a family garage sale and put up the garage sale on a busy street or on a small bazaar nearby, where a lot of people would pass by. 

Make them a price list with ranges on the cheapest price they could bargain for, so that they can still sell the items at a reasonable price. Let your kids keep the money they earned from selling their own items.

Selling Recyclable Items

Let your child collect all the recyclable items in your house such as cans, bottles, newspapers, and then take them to your local recyclable plant to generate some extra cash. Make sure you know how much they pay for a kilo of these items.

Another way to make use of recyclable items is to recreate them into something useful. Most people nowadays prefer to buy eco-friendly items that are made from recycled materials. For example, you can create a bird cage out of milk cartons or your large plastic bottle as hanging planters for indoor planting. You may check this site to get ideas on how to create crafts out of recyclable materials. 

Bake To Sell

If your kids love to bake some cookies and other pastries, why not let them bake cookies, brownies, and cupcakes, and offer them for sale? In this way, they both enhanced their skills in baking and selling. Moreover, it will boost their confidence, especially, if people love and compliment their baked pastries.

They can also sell these pastries, alongside with their lemonade stand wherein it’s a two-in-one stand for drinks and cookies. This will surely be an epic!

Help In Family Business

Let your kids be involved in your family business by assigning them simple tasks such as filling papers, teaching them basic office work, or emailing. In this way, it will give them a background about your family business at their young age, how it works and how to manage it, so that they can succeed  the company by the time you need to retire from running your family business. 

As your kids do their jobs to earn extra money, you may also grab this opportunity to introduce to them the importance of other financial disciplines such as saving, banking, and investing. 

Tips On How To Introduce Financial Disciples To Your Kids

At a very young age, it is important to inculcate to your children’s mind the value of saving, investing, and proper budgeting of money, so that by the time they are already fully-grown adults, they know that every cent counts and it makes a difference. 

Therefore, here are some great tips you must learn how to teach your kids important financial disciplines.

Do Not Spoil Them 

It is very common for parents to grant every wish of their children, which is not a good habit. Be it buying for a new smartphone, shoes, bags, and toys; it seems like they are a genie in a bottle that are obliged to fulfill their child’s wishes. 

Therefore, instead of spoiling them, you may encourage them to earn for their wishes. For example, they must know how to save the money they received on their birthdays or during Christmas so that they can use that money for buying things they want.

Introduce The Piggy-banks

If you want to teach your children about saving, you can start by introducing piggy banks. Teach them about this piggy bank in the most understandable way. For example, you may say to them that this piggy bank will continue to live if you insert some coins and money papers, or the piggy bank will be happy if you fill it up until it is full.

Make sure that you give them a transparent piggy bank so that they can see the progress and how their money grows by inserting some coins every single day or they can see how it depletes if they withdraw money from it.

In this way, your child will hesitate to spend money on buying things and this is a great way to teach your children the difference between needs and wants.

Teach Them How To Track Down Expenses

It is also important to teach your children the importance of tracking down expenses, because this will give them the idea where they spend their money. First, you must teach them how to do it. For example, in a piece of paper write their daily expenses, how much was still left, what portion eats most of their money. 

In this way, it also teaches your kids how to budget their money for savings and  for other expenses. 

Introduce Financial Institutions such As Banks

One great way to introduce the banking world to your children is through opening a joint-account with them. Withstanding the entries of your passbook on a regular basis will help your child understand the principle of cash flows

As your child starts to earn extra money from the potential jobs listed above, encourage your child to plan their budget and allocate most of their budget on savings. Help him to get a systematic investment plan (SIP) into a mutual fund and target for a long-term commitment. 
This investment will surely grow in time so that once your child has matured enough to understand the principles of compounding, he/she will get to know the importance of being a good investor.