Unleashing Creativity and Entrepreneurship: Classic Ways for Kids to Earn Money This Summer

For kids, summer opens the door to endless possibilities. It’s a time for picking up a first job, perfecting a treasured hobby, and unlocking one’s creative potential. With weather warming across much of the northern hemisphere, the opportunities are ample; from those timeless, tried-and-true ways of catching the cash-flow wave, like the old-fashioned lemonade stand, to the latest online opportunities, today’s kids can dip their toes into the 21st-century economy. From bar mitzvahs to bat mitzvahs, bridesmaids to grad nights, here are great, traditional ways for kids to stuff that piggy bank this summer.

CLASSIC OUTDOOR OPPORTUNITIES

Lawn Care: A Green Thumb’s Gateway to Earnings

One of the classic ways that kids make money during the summer is by taking care of lawns and gardens: mowing lawns, trimming bushes, and sometimes helping to plant and water gardens. These jobs offer a chance to make money, to be outside, and to learn about nature—a good combination for kids to make money and grow a green, lush learning summer.

The Joy of Pet Sitting and Dog Walking

Pet-sitting and dog-walking are popular business lines for kids to pursue, since many families are planning summer breaks. Caring for other people’s four-legged friends is a great responsibility, which offers qualifications galore for a burgeoning entrepreneur – empathy, time management and plenty of furry fun scampering down the summer streets.

Babysitting: Cultivating Responsibility and Fun

There are plenty of parents out there who are on the lookout for trusted babysitters during the summer break. For teenagers offering babysitting services, this is a great source of income to supplement their monthly allowance. Not only will it provide fun for the kids, but it’ll also make the children and babysitter’s days a lot more thoughtful and creative! It’s an easy way to take on responsibility with imagination and love.

EXPLORING BUSINESS AND SKILL-BASED OPPORTUNITIES

Tutoring: Sharing Knowledge, Earning Rewards

For kids excelling at any subject, tutoring provides a path to not only bolstering self-esteem, but helping peers reach graduation requirements – the age-old business with the allure of making money while also reviewing material for yourself. This tried and true summer job is truly rewarding.

Young Entrepreneurs: Starting a Small Business

Nothing cultivates creativity and entrepreneurial spirit in children more than encouraging them to convert their hobbies into a small business. Whether it’s jewellery making or pet photography, a mini-business is a wonderful present that doubles up as a life lesson – and comes with an attractive profit.

Dive Into Seasonal Job Opportunities

Once summer arrives, jobs at nearby theme parks, hotels and camps become available to kids who want to make some money, learn some life lessons and get a sense of what it’s like to work outside of school.

EMBRACING THE DIGITAL AGE AND CREATIVE VENTURES

Mastering Online Opportunities

Thanks to the digital world, there are lots of options available for kids to use their skills to make money. For instance, they can take part in online surveys to earn some money or even tutor kids online.

Crafting and Selling: Unleash the Inner Artist

From thriftiness to ingenuity, from the basic exercise in economics to kids making and, for the first time, selling their crafts or artwork for wider consumption – via websites such as Etsy or competing eBay for Kids – the digital democratisation of enterprise is, among other things, another subtle gamechanger.

Imparting Skills: Teaching Sports or Dance

For kids with sporty or dancing skills, they can teach their peers for extra money, develop their leadership skills and establish their resolve to continue the activity.

A CLASSIC FINALE: Learning and Earning

The Essence of Classic Endeavors

Classic, for purposes of this summer jobs discourse, refers as much to the inherent classic-ness of these pursuits – their enduring values of responsibility and creativity and initiative – as it does to the enduring nature of the pursuits themselves, the classic pathways that lots of kids have blazed through the summers of their lives. Classic is not only about the job; it’s also about the lessons about yourself that the job can teach you – about your capacity to learn and grow and, yes, even enjoy the learning and growing.

Summertime is the season on which kids paint their own canvas. And what is more classic than the child in summer, dreaming of raking in dough from those dusty green lawns, perhaps cooling off first at the corner convenience store, and emerging with a fistful of quarters, which gets tossed into the junk pile, mixed with treasure; and perhaps more than one egg sale card is balanced on an open hand when the doorbell rings. In that moment, the classic quest for summer bucks reveals what it will take to make that possible, not just this summer, but all along the way.