In this series of blogs, I am offering tips on raising entrepreneurial girls. When you raise girls to think like entrepreneurs, they go on to become creators and entrepreneurs. In addition, these tips will lead to children learning to increase their mental agility and to develop adaptive thinking.
Here I’m looking at the first tip for raising entrepreneurial girls: Make play time curiosity time.
Curiosity is one of the most vital instincts in every human being. Curiosity nurtures crucial strengths such as resilience. Curiosity plays a key role in generating adaptive capability.
A girl who’s in touch with her natural curiosity can engage and entertain herself without requiring external stimulation like television and video games. Through curiosity, she sharpens her ability to ask questions, she follows her inquisitiveness, she creates predictive models, tests them, and repeats the cycle, but with more information and new insights.
A curious girl who knows her own mind is less likely to sink into passivity. She is more likely to define herself as an active creator.
In my work with VentureLab, I’ve had many opportunities to watch kids follow their curiosity instinct, often with magical results.
For example, one 9-year-old girl, Emma, worried that her pet mice were not sufficiently entertained by the toys in their cage. Emma often added extra sticks and playthings to the cage in an effort to keep her mice engaged and happy, but she still believed there had to be more to their little lives than that. Emma’s curiosity instinct kicked in. She wondered whether she could she design a more interesting environment, and then how she might determine if the mice liked it.
Luckily, Emma’s mother understood and supported her daughter’s curiosity. She provided the tools to make Emma’s project possible, and Emma devoured those tools, her budding curiosity piqued.
Emma ended up creating a maze that challenged the brains of the mice. It also became an exercise in science and statistics as Emma studied which direction the mice would turn, right or left, when they came to a T-shaped intersection with no clues about which way to turn.
This all transpired because her mother applied what she herself had learned in an entrepreneurial workshop, and had passed on that enthusiasm to her daughter.
In my next post, I will look at the second tip for raising entrepreneurial girls: letting them get messy. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you’ve worked with the girls in your life to foster their curiosity with the result that the girls were able to tackle a project in an innovative way. What happened? Thank you for sharing!
