If you have children, you may know that getting them to help around the home can be as much of a chore as the tasks themselves. From learning responsibility to taking pride in a job well done, even the simplest household chores teach valuable skills as they enter adulthood and move into a home of their own. This article from the Wall Street Journal offers a unique take on the typical household chore. Alexandra Samuel examines the tasks children can take on now to develop valuable tech skills for their future endeavors.
Many families introduce their children to the world of work before they bring up the idea of entrepreneurship. But you don’t need to limit your children’s earning potential to baby sitting, dog walking or lawn mowing.
By offering your children some ways to earn pocket money through tech chores, you introduce them to life as a tech worker. If your children are old enough to tackle slightly more challenging tasks, they can even learn valuable tech skills while they’re helping out.
Put little children to work with the kind of routine, time-consuming tasks that are tempting to avoid. They may not acquire a lot of tech skills in the process, but they’ll get more comfortable using devices and get used to the idea that it takes some work to keep everything running smoothly. To that end, you might put your elementary schooler in charge of:
Scanning business cards. When you come back from a conference, hand your child your phone, along with the collection of business cards you’ve accumulated. Ask your child to scan all the cards into your phone using an app like Evernote Scannable, CamScanner or Scanbot. Pay your child a nickel, dime or quarter per card.
Ripping CDs. In a world of Spotify and iTunes, it can be hard to justify that shelf full of CDs—but just as hard to throw them all out. Get your children to rip your collection and add them to your digital music library. Yes, you could achieve the same result by sending your collection to a ripping service, but they’ll charge 70 cents to $1 a disc—so if you can get Junior to do the same job for 25 cents a disc, you’re way ahead!
Managing cables. Look into the average home-media center, and you’ll see a cable snarl to rival Medusa. Hand your child a Sharpie and a roll of masking tape, ask him to label each cable at both ends and then unplug the whole setup: that will allow him to keep track of which cord goes with which device. Then you can have him unplug everything, de-snarl the mess and inspect it for any cables that weren’t actually plugged into anything. The job of putting it all back together is a great chance to strengthen spatial and logical thinking by finding the most sensible route for all the different cords.
{Read the full article: Want to raise a tech entrepreneur? Give your child these chores.}
