All parents want their children to do well and are willing to jump through almost any hoop to get them there. Homeschooling allows you the freedom to design your curriculum geared toward the mental age, ability, and specific challenges of each child. Entrepreneurship education is becoming more commonly explored by parents as a viable option for parents to choose from.
If you tuned in for my article last time, you’ll remember that I was talking about teaching entrepreneurship to children with disabilities. I wrote about my son, Josh, and his success building himself a solid career as a Sales Director despite his disability. I’d like to share a similar but totally different success story this week.
Our youngest son Ben responded to a similar, but dramatically simplified, approach. Not so long ago, it was a theory that those with Down syndrome could not learn. We now know that they simply learn differently. The tricky part was finding the route to helping Ben learn what he needed to know.
Hands-on activities directly connected to how that skill was used in daily life produced remarkable results! You probably can’t guess that entrepreneurship gave us one way to do this, too.
I’m sure there are many ways to use a hands-on approach to teach any subject, but coming from multiple generations of entrepreneurs, this was a logical choice for many of our school lessons and amazingly easy to implement.
Like other parents of children with Down syndrome and similar disabilities, we wondered how he would provide for himself someday. Ben graduated high school at 19, and found that suitable jobs for him were rare in our rural community.
We’re happy to report that Ben, at the age of 25, has his own business. It doesn’t provide a full time income for him yet, but he is well on his way to accomplishing this. He’s busy all day, happy, motivated, and a very hard worker. He’s been an inspiration to many others like him, and we are excited to see what his future holds.
See you next time,
Deb Maubach
