Enabling Their Dreams

How to support our kids dreams.

And how we ended up with a Yard Sale this weekend.

My middle daughter is a very ambitious little lady. She wants to be a chef, a musician, a dancer, you name it, she wants to do it! She constantly has new ideas and wants to try new things. She has created a homeschool "curriculum" packet for her kindergarten-aged cousin before. She's created a menu to go along with her plastic kitchen toys and made us all sit down and order from her "restaurant". She's constantly coming up with new and creative ideas and testing them out on us. ;)

One constant in this array of ambitions is money. :) She likes to make money, which is great. She works hard on her chores so she can earn her every-other-week "pay check". She gets small fines as a consequence sometimes and she finds that very motivating. 

She's been watching her dad and I sell various things on Craigslist and she has wanted to do the same. She'll save things that normally would go to the Giveaway Bin and she'll come up with a price and tell me she want to sell it instead. "I want to sell my set of books for $10," She'd say. Or "I could sell my kite for $15." Her prices are always high because of her high ambition... and rather unrealistic. Moreover, I've never had a PLACE she could sell anything, so she'd always end up keeping it or giving it away eventually because she really didn't want to keep it.

Now, here's the thing. I have been tempted to just say "Hey, I'll buy that from you for two bucks," and let her have that ambition fulfilled... but would that really work? Not really. First off, I know my kid, if I bought ANYTHING from her she would try to sell me EVERYTHING she had, and she can be quite persuasive. Secondly, I want her to learn how to earn money in a real-life way.

1) Mainly, people work to get money.

2) If your selling stuff it has to be reasonably priced and something people want to buy.

So this last week I was going through a big clean out. My daughters and I tackled downsizing their room this weekend (we try to keep it minimal but things always get accumulated and before I know it they have too much stuff and it's overwhelming to manage it all). As my girls went through and got rid of everything they didn't need or want anymore I found in my middle daughter's Book Drawer two categories of books: "Keep" and "Sell"...

I have thought many time of doing a Yard Sale because I certainly get rid of enough stuff to have a yard sale but I've never wanted to do the work. I rather just donate it and get the tax write off... But as I looked at that "Sell" pile in my daughter's drawers and she explained what and why she wanted to sell, I thought "What the heck. I can do a Yard Sale and then my daughter can have a place to sell what she wants."

So... now I'm in over my head! My entire house in torn apart as I try to get rid of as much stuff as possible for this weekend's yard sale. My daughters are going to help with all of the process and running the yard sale and get half of the cut, so here we go!

My encouragement to you Mamas, is find a way (a practical way) to enable your kids dreams. Try to give them the opportunity to try things and see how they work. Changes to give things a shot and fail at things. As they grow, increase the boundaries of what they are allowed to do and teach them how to do it. We are raising adults here, not kids! Enabling their dreams is a big part of, not only creating grounded kids but also, giving them wings to fly, explore, and transform into who they will become.

As always,

Much love to you Mamas,

-Joy