As a parent, you want to ensure your child has the education and resources to reach their full potential.  Perhaps some of your kids are interested in entrepreneurship in STEM fields, and you’re wondering how you can help them achieve their dreams. With these practical tips, you can actually help create future entrepreneurs right in your home.

The Benefits of Youth Entrepreneurship

Some people might think that teens are too young to pursue entrepreneurship. However, teens who start their own business can benefit from the experience in many ways. For instance, young entrepreneurs can work to save more money, gain access to exciting opportunities, and work towards their goals without facing the pressing financial burdens of adulthood.

Prepare Them for Adulthood

Teaching teens to be entrepreneurs isn’t just about increasing their odds for a financially stable future. It’s also about giving them the tools they’ll need for adulthood by prepping them for tasks they’ll face on a regular basis, from writing a check or doing their taxes. By covering these things now, you don’t just give them the opportunity to ask questions in a safe environment; you also subtly impress upon them your belief that these are tasks they’re capable of handling one day.

Business Models for Teens

 Your teenage children might have a wide range of interests that could inspire their business ideas. If some of your children are curious about entrepreneurship, but they don’t know what types of companies they could start, you can provide some suggestions. Lendio states that teens can often be successful at running online stores, social media management companies, or providing web design services. Any of these models could appeal to teens who want to leverage their STEM skills!

Encourage your teens to write business plans. These documents will provide a roadmap to take a business from an idea to a reality. PDFs are a good file type to use for this, and a free tool will let you edit PDF docs online. This way, they can add and change their plans as they come up with new and better ideas. 

Here’s what should typically be included in a business plan:

• Executive Summary: An overview of the business, including its name, location, and concept. It should also summarize the business goals and key features of the product or service.

• Business Description: Detailed information about the business, the market needs it will fulfill, and the competitive advantages it has over similar businesses.

• Market Analysis: This section analyzes the industry, market size, and demographics of potential customers. It also assesses competitors and outlines the target market’s characteristics.

• Organization and Management: Describes the business structure (e.g., partnership, corporation), details of ownership, and profiles of the management team. Include an organizational chart if possible.

• Products or Services: This part provides detailed information about the product or service being offered, including details on the lifecycle, benefits to the customer, and the current development stage.

• Marketing and Sales Strategy: How the business intends to attract customers and the sales strategy (direct sales, sales reps, online sales, etc.). One example is customizing merchandise through Boost Promotional Products.

• Funding Request: If seeking funding, specify the amount needed over the next five years and what it will be used for. Describe the type of funding requested (loans, equity investment).

• Financial Projections: Highlight the financial outlook and expected profitability.

• Appendix: An optional section that includes resumes of key employees, legal documents, product pictures, marketing materials, and any other supporting information.

Encouraging teens to develop such documents not only teaches them about the logistics of starting and running a business but also improves their planning and critical thinking skills.

Marketing Strategies

For many new entrepreneurs, learning how to market their business can represent a major hurdle. Lots of business owners have great ideas for new products and services, but they don’t know how to reach their target audience! If you want to help your children advertise effectively, find ways to talk about marketing and social skills.

Depending on the resources and programs you have access to, you could teach your children about developing basic business apps, using social media for promotion, or creating a blog or email newsletter. You could even turn some of these ideas into projects, like launching a blog and giving all of your children the chance to write their own posts.

Pricing, Negotiating, and Advocating

Young business owners often face a steep learning curve when it comes to mastering the arts of pricing, negotiating, and self-advocacy. Instill negotiating and advocacy skills in your children by hosting debates and teaching them how to confidently assert their views with clear evidence. You could also have your children write on hot-button topics. Furthermore, your children can learn about setting accurate prices for products and services through math. Feel free to use math concepts that business owners need to understand, like figuring out revenue and balancing budgets.

Lots of teens want to become entrepreneurs, but they might not feel confident about taking the initial steps to start their own businesses. As a parent, you can help your children hone their entrepreneurial skills for business success. With these tips, you’ll be able to teach your children about all of the ins and outs of business ownership.

Everyone with access to a screen in the modern era, whether a phone, tablet or gaming computer, needs help pulling away from their compelling content. Obsessive tendencies could make anyone’s reaction time or sensory awareness compromised.

However, sometimes in children, sensory processing disorder (SPD) explains more than an overreliance on technology for distractions. Understand the relationship between screen time and SPD, knowing how the signals illuminate a child’s development.

What is Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD)?

SPD explains when the brain registers senses differently than others. Sometimes it is challenging to diagnose as it is a side effect of another condition or a child may need behavioral analysis.

Processing the five senses — sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch — could be difficult, delayed or cause sensitivities. However, SPD also affects other sensory abilities, including:

• Proprioception: Understanding the relationship between movement and location.
• Interoception: Perceiving internal occurrences in the body.
• Vestibular: Sensing balance and maintaining stable mobility.

When a child’s senses are affected by SPD, or its variants, such as sensory-based motor disorder (SBMD), it can alter their development. When encountering modern sensory influences like screens, it’s evident how the relationship between the two phenomena could impact mental, physical and emotional growth.

1. Screens Shouldn’t Be the Default Distraction

Guardians should find alternative ways to distract or cure children from distress. Not only do the rapid movements of cartoons or social media engagement confuse how their brains process visual stimuli, but it also exposes them to excess blue light, halting melatonin production needed for restful, healing sleep.

Human brains, especially for developing children, still need to adapt to match the influx of information coming through screens — and adult humans still haven’t perfected the art of processing information at the speed screens pressure our minds to.

Studies explain how screens cause developmental issues in young children, specifically those under two. Though many parents find screens an easy solution for a screaming child, this seemingly harmless phone passing could have long-term consequences, especially for children who already experience alternative sensory processing.

The system processing sensory input and mood analysis — the vestibular system — is inactive in front of screens, making them unable to practice controlling and responding to emotional changes.

2. Not All Skills Are Equal

Parents may be impressed by their child’s fine motor skills playing video games on a tablet or the ability to ingest information from YouTube videos. Though these skills may be helpful for a modern learning environment, excess exposure to these mediums inhibits potential learning in other soft skills, such as emotional awareness or relationship building.

Parents must not get distracted by the proficiency their children with SPD have in screen-related skills so much they forget how essential it is to peel them away to practice other talents. Parents can have pride, but they must remember how their sensory perceptions may not be able to adapt equally to skills outside of screens, like collaborative social interactions or anger management.

Handing children with SPD screens could immediately test their sensory capabilities in a discomforting way, causing sensory overload or chemical imbalances preventing further growth. No matter how much fun the child has or how focused they seem, sometimes the adverse effects aren’t immediately apparent.

Their minds are working on overdrive to keep up, and though this seems like a welcome test in maintaining attention, it tires most minds past capacity to where taking the screen away causes temperament issues.

3. Instigating Conversations Cause Self-Awareness

Children with SPD can adapt as long as parents set expectations early. Consider setting screen limits or creating habits to actively discuss how the child feels after extended time with screens. Parents could make a healthy, intentional routine of practicing self-reflection by asking their children with SPD after each screen session:

• How did you feel before using this technology, and how do you feel now?
• Did you learn anything while using the screen, and are there ways you could’ve learned this lesson without the screen?
• What drew you to the screen in the first place? Was it an emotion like boredom or frustration that could’ve been mitigated with another activity?
• What sights and sounds did you notice, and how did they make you feel?

Prompting questions like these will not openly vilify screen time — because sometimes it does have merit, especially for learning. However, it will force children with SPD to analyze their senses and feelings more actively.

4. Physical Side Effects Happen Alongside the Emotional

Screens inhibit emotional and sensory processing in the vestibular system. However, it’s vital to prevent other forms of stunted development. For children who may already struggle with developmental problems, adding physical conditions to the mix will only exacerbate sensory development.

One of the most common side effects of extended screen time is hunched backs and strained necks. The body shouldn’t be in these positions for long, and it causes insufficient self-regulation, among other ailments:

• Poor posture and back health
• Neck issues, like reduced neck extension
• Fewer chances for proprioception, causing stiff joints and less nervous system stimulation
• Sight deficiencies like depth perception problems or nearsightedness
• Reduced sleep quality

Developing Healthy Relationships With Screens

Everyone will feel the effects of prolonged screen exposure. However, children with SPD must pay special attention to how they interact and think after spending time with them. Parents can monitor their children and how they use screens.

However, technology is an inevitability humans need to learn to live alongside for a sustainable future. Instilling healthy habits and meaningful self-reflection will help children with alternative sensory development experiences evolve safely without an over-reliance on technology.

About the Author
Ava Roman (she/her) is the Managing Editor of Revivalist, a women’s lifestyle magazine that empowers women to live their most authentic life. When Ava is not writing you’ll find her in a yoga class, advocating for her children or whipping up something delicious in the kitchen!

Computers are here to stay. Most of our world can’t run without them — including household appliances — and in order for things like your car to drive, planes to navigate, televisions to play your favorite show, or grandmas’ dinner to not burn in the oven, the world needs coders.

What you may not know is that between the steadily increasing demand for employees in this sector and competitive salaries, you may be overlooking a very stable career path.

As with any subject matter there is a variety of nuanced fields which all relate to the main topic, but the differentiations between those roles is dependent on the type of knowledge and experience gained. Here is a breakdown of some major sectors in the coding business world and the average salaries that accompany those positions.

1) Software Developers

Software developers create a broad range of tools generally meant to enhance functionality of mobile, desktop, and operating systems for customer usability. They accomplish this by creating and testing the programs that become the client-facing web pages and applications the public use every day.

In order to do this, they employ a host of problem solving skills all while translating solutions into program languages, “code”, which serve as the directions for those mobile and desktop applications.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), “the median annual wage for software developers was $120,730 in May of 2021.” Starting wages for such positions are around $90,000 annually.

2) Database Administration

Data administrators do a little bit of everything. They need to monitor, manage, and manipulate code in ways that allow for companies or programs to interact with each other. These professionals seek to make sure the software is complete and working properly. They also strive to prevent data loss, and make any necessary changes when flaws are found in a system.

Before you make a commitment to career in coding, While there is a much broader spectrum of salaries to this position — $63,000 on the low end, $125,000 on the top end — U.S News found that a median annual salary for Database Administrators is around $96,000.

3) Data Scientists

Data Scientists have the responsibility of formulating systems which perform detailed analytics of massive amounts of data. By building machines and software which engage with users and systems, they seek to learn from that gathered information. The infrastructure that data scientists create are crucial to understanding how people and software interact with each other.

Salary.com shows the average salary for Data Scientists as $139,631, with a range of $124,400 to $153,880 per year.

4)  Web Developer

Web development (similar to web design) is the production of the underlying code which directs the actions of websites. They are the front-facing, interactive pages that people engage with anytime they visit a website. High demands from large and small business owners over the years have seen a rise in the need and availability of work for companies and as freelancers. Generally providing design, formatting, and troubleshooting, web developers attend to a broad range of responsibilities.

This is another job with a significant salary range — around $43,000 starting, $91,000 for more experienced work — but still a very steady median range. Payscale.com lists web development positions at around $62,000 annually.  Full stack developers tend to earn a lot more, from around $99,000 to start up to $150,000 for the most experienced workers.  This is because these developers possess both front and back end skills. Therefore, companies only need to hire one person, as opposed to getting two people who are only equipped to do one or the other job.

Next Steps

In order to save you some time, and the annoyance of sorting through thousands of websites and opinions about what coding is, here is a solid survey of the different job positions and what their salaries are.

What should also be noted about this sector of the tech industry is the emergent demand for women in fields traditionally held by men. The intentional diversification of teams has created a host of opportunities and incentives for women, such as scholarships, with the goal of encouraging the betterment of society and closing the gender gap.

Today, nearly every school in our country has an emphasis on STEM subjects. The growing demand of accessibility to STEM activities has created plenty of programs and clubs to join in or out of school rooms. If, however, a club or classroom setting is not what you respond to, there are also coding games (yes, you heard me right) designed to simultaneously engage and teach principles of coding. Each provides the opportunities to try out the subject matter needed to pursue an education or career in coding.

• Read 7 things to consider before joining online coding classes
• Starting kids young!  The basics of coding explained

The Ultimate Guide to Creating Effective and Engaging Instructional Videos is a step-by-step guide that provides the tools and knowledge required to create effective and engaging instructional videos. These including planning and scripting, filming and lighting, and editing and post production.

Educators who create instructional videos engage their students while learning and studying.  This is especially the case with those who respond to visual learning. All aspects needed to easily make instructional videos are included in this guide:

Planning and Scripting:

Planning and scripting are critical steps in producing an effective instructional video. The following are some suggestions for writing a clear and concise script:

1. Define the video’s purpose and objectives.
2. Determine the intended audience.
3. Outline the main points that will be covered in the video.
4. Avoid jargon and use simple language.
5. Keep your script brief and to the point.

You should plan the video ahead of time.:

1. Make a storyboard to visualize the video’s flow.
2. Divide the script into different sections or scenes.
3. Determine the necessary props, equipment, and locations.
4. Determine the video’s overall length.
5. Plan the video’s pacing so that it flows smoothly and keeps the audience engaged.

Following these guidelines will allow you to write a clear and concise script that effectively conveys information to the audience while also ensuring that the video flows smoothly.

Filming and Lighting:

Lighting and filming are critical components of producing a professional-looking instructional video. The following are the best filming practices:

1. To avoid shaky video, use a stable camera mount.
2. Correctly framing shots to create a visually appealing composition
3. Keeping the camera steady and smoothly panning or zooming
4. Taking photos from various angles to add visual interest and variety
5. To keep the camera steady, use a tripod or stabilizer.

The following are the best lighting practices:

1. When possible, use natural light to achieve a more natural look.
2. Adding depth and dimension to your shots by utilizing multiple light sources.
3. Diffusers are used to soften harsh shadows.
4. Backlighting should be avoided because it can cast unwanted shadows.
5. Using a light meter to ensure consistent and balanced lighting levels throughout the video.

You will be able to create a visually appealing, professional-looking instructional video if you follow these best practices.

Editing and Post-Production:

Editing and post-production are important steps in producing a polished and professional instructional video. Among the methods for making a clip are:

1. To organize and edit your footage, use a non-linear editor (NLE) software such as Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro, or Avid Media Composer.
2. Trimming and cutting footage to achieve a consistent flow and pacing
3. Adding transitions, text, and graphics to improve the video’s visual appeal
4. Using color correction and grading to improve the video’s overall look and feel
5. Including sound effects and music to improve audio quality and make the experience more engaging.
6. Create clip from the footage to highlight key moments.

Adding special effects, animations, and other visual enhancements to the video is also part of the post-production process. Following these techniques will allow you to create a polished, professional instructional video with engaging and effective clips.

Publishing and Distribution:

The final step in creating an instructional video is publishing and distribution. The following are the best publishing and distribution practices:

1. The final edited video is exported in a format that is compatible with various platforms and devices.
2. Optimizing the video for various video hosting platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, and Wistia.
3. Creating a captivating video title and description in order to attract viewers
4. Making the video more discoverable by using keywords and tags
5. Creating a visually appealing video thumbnail that accurately represents the video’s content
6. Adding closed captions or subtitles to the video to make it more accessible to a larger audience.
7. Sharing and promoting the video across multiple platforms, including social media, email marketing, and other channels.

Conclusion:

Creating an instructional video is simply another way to capture the attention of students.  It’s another method of storytelling no matter what the subject is.  By following the steps outlined in the guide, you will be able to create engaging, effective, and professional-looking instructional videos.