Teaching Entrepreneurship to Children with Disabilities

Deb Maubach started homeschooling her 4 entrepreneurs in 1983 before homeschooling was popular and founded Homeschool Entrepreneur in 2006 before entrepreneurial education was popular, too. She’s also considering Greenland for retirement in the future before it becomes popular.

A child with a disability can mean many things. It can include something as severe as being confined to a wheelchair or a child that cannot talk or respond to you. Though milder on the disability scale, it is no less exhausting or challenging to deal with a child with a behavioral or attention disability. Even children with genius I.Q.s are often challenged socially and struggle with some of the most basic life skills.

Disabilities seem to lie on both ends of what some consider ‘normal’. Most educational and teaching methods are geared to that normal range of ability. The beauty of homeschooling is the freedom you have to design your curriculum to the mental age, ability, and specific challenges of each child. We’re excited that entrepreneurship education is becoming more common on the menu of options parents have to choose from.

We were blessed with four healthy children that we decided to homeschool from birth through high school graduation, with the exception of our oldest child. We initially began her homeschool when her first grade teacher suggested she would benefit from the type of one-on-one education that homeschooling could offer. I guess that was our first exposure to teaching a child outside of the normal range! We gave up after one year, but started again four years later at the encouragement of our pediatrician. It was the 80’s, so opposition was high and support was low for those making such a radical choice!

All four of our children had various challenges to overcome, but our two youngest were formally diagnosed with a disability; one with ADD and one with Down syndrome.

Like most homeschool families, our approach to each child was very different! Our son with ADD had us quite concerned when at 6 years old he still struggled with colors and letter identification. However, when he started to spout off the answers to his older brother’s advanced math problems without the use of paper or calculators, we knew we were dealing with a different sort of disability than first suspected.

Before Josh was formally tagged with ADD, we discovered that he responded very well to the type of hands-on activities that entrepreneurship education offered. What we had interpreted as an intelligence-based disability (I hope he isn’t reading this!) was simply a very different learning style than his older siblings. He wasn’t learning because he had difficulty paying attention to auditory instruction and would zone out even under threat of being sold to traveling gypsies. However, when we gave purpose and activity to that same instruction, Josh began to thrive.

Despite allowing him to be labeled with ADD, Josh caught up very quickly once we mastered his learning style. He enjoyed the benefits of several entrepreneurial pursuits up to and through college. Fortunately, with a little extra help, he was able to transfer his unique learning habits to college life. To our delight and amazement, he not only finished college, but graduated cum laude with a Business Finance degree.

Now, at 30 years old, he’s happily and gainfully employed as the Sales Director of a moderately large company that gives him the time he craves to be with his wife and three young children. How many of us can say we love our job and enjoy going to work every day?

We give God the glory for his success, and for showing us how entrepreneurship and teaching outside of the box could make such a dramatic difference. I shudder to think of what may have happened if we had put him into a traditional school setting.

In my next article, I’ll talk about my son with Down syndrome and what we did to help him.

See you next time,

Deb Maubach

Homeschool-Entrepreneur.com

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