Mind in the Making – Developing Focus and Self-Control

In her book, Mind in the Making, Ellen Galinsky offers  a lot of practical advice to parents on how to help their children develop the 7 essential life skills. In a recent post, we talked about making daily plans to help our children develop focus. Another way to help children develop focus and self-control is through the age-old activity of running a lemonade stand. Children can learn a lot about running a lemonade stand that goes beyond just focus and self-control, however, an activity like this is only suitable for older children. Not to mention, we need to take into consideration safety issues, especially in this day and age…

However, in this day and age, we also have another tool up our sleeve – the Internet. Our children can still learn the lessons about running a lemonade stand without necessarily having to run a physical lemonade stand. They can learn the same lessons by playing games like Donut Empire which allows them to run a donut stand instead of a lemonade stand. Just as with a lemonade stand, the children need to monitor their stocks for ingredients, decide how much to buy so they can take advantage of bulk discounts without overbuying (and going over their budget or using up all their money), they need to decide how much to sell their donuts for so that they can make a profit, etc.

Playing a game like Donut Empire, allows your child to experiment and learn about the world of sales and marketing. Once he’s learned the lessons on running a small business in a virtual world, he can take it into the real world with a real life experience. With the power of the Internet, he doesn’t even need a physical stall to sell his products because you can help him set up an ecommerce store on eBay, or sell his home-made crafts on Etsy.