My fourth-grade daughter, this afternoon at the lunch table, told me she wants to make money running a coffee stand.

Most of the time my children’s vocation ideas are garbage. This is not to say they are garbage or that I am not proud of their creative minds, but they’re kids. Ice cream and Coke for dinner every night sounds like a perfectly legitimate practice to them. My son wants to be a YouTube star, for example. I keep trying to encourage him to prioritize his studies over mastering the art of getting subs.

But my daughter… I have hope for that one. At first, she got the paternal nod from me and metaphorical pat on the head. “That’s great, honey. Now run along and play with the dogs.” But the more I thought about it, the more excited I got. And I began spit-balling ideas with her.

It’s not that I think she’s going to become a millionaire selling baked goods on the street. And you can reasonably criticize me for getting way too excited about starting my child’s career this early. But the older I get and the more I listen to the news, the more depressed I get about my kids’ futures. As Bernie Sanders has been railing about for a generation, wages have not kept up with corporate profits. Inflation is making that exponentially worse right now. College is overpriced and is increasingly becoming not worth the investment. So the more I can encourage a “you go girl/girl-boss/be-independent” mentality in my daughter, the better. No one else is going to help her in the work world. It’s an ocean full of sharks out there.

I know if she really tried to do this, she would probably barely make anything. But I think of what she would learn: hard work, how to appeal to customers, how to interact with people of different ages. The reality of a job where people depend on you. Not full-time, but, you know, a morning here or there.

More than that, when I first started my own self-employed music teaching business, I didn’t have enough students to cover the cost of living. I slowly grew it while living at home with my mom. If she started now – or a few years from now – she could have her own side-hustle to pay for college or more.

Is all this going too far? Does plotting out my elementary school-aged child’s career seem a little extreme? Forgive me for getting too excited. When I see such initiative, it makes me proud of them and a little less depressed about sending them into this world.

Because, when the time comes, watching them leave our house will be like sending soldiers into a war I know is going to rip them up and knock them down, however meaningful it is to fight in it.

Frankly, the more weapons they have, the better.

(Pic generated by AI at Midjourney)