Self-Devpt. Nuggets™

Once again, I share insights from my Best Practice Parenting activities with my kids, in the hope that other parents will realize that they CAN make out time to coach their kids to acquire real world relevant knowledge, attitudes and skills.

Like I’ve said in past parenting articles, I consider vocational skills development of the utmost importance for kids. Evidence of the accuracy of this line of thinking is today apparent from the widespread practice in which many tertiary institutions today have Centres for Entrepreneurship Development on site – which some now even make compulsory for students to attend.

Beyond that, graduates who have to undergo the National Youth Service Corps year, now get exposed to vocational/entrepreneurship skills training.

Why?

Because those in charge KNOW that most of them are not going to find good jobs to support themselves easily. So regardless of their individual courses of study, products from today’s schools are being – rightly – encouraged to think of starting their own businesses well ahead of doing any job searches.

I discovered the above truths long ago, and the struggle I had to endure to establish myself as an entrepreneur, after leapving the relative security of paid employment convinced me of the need to give my kids BETTER preparation for what awaits them in the real world – post formal schooling.

It is for this reason that my home is today a school of sorts – but with major emphasis on vocational/entrepreneurship skills development.

I and my kids have come a long way with the Personal Achievement Coaching for Kids(PACK) program I’ve been taking them through.

You can read through the archives in the Parenting Articles category to for stories I’ve told of past projects.

It is instructive to note that I’ve chosen to coach them to be multipreneurial like I am, but with a major focus on achieving the vision I have of establishing a home based family restaurant business with them.

We will be creating our own unique range of products (food and drinks) based on original recipes we conceive. Already, we have our own Pineapple Peel based Drinks and Cakes, Cookies and Chin-Chin, African Style Pizza and most recently – our Specialty Soft and Fluffy Bread Loaves – all baked using our trademark No-Oven Charcoal Stove!

It is this last product – the specialty Soft and Fluffy Bread Loaves – which we finally got right today, with regard to the recipe we’ve been looking for.

And guess what? It happened quite by accident over a week ago.

My soon-to-be 15 year old son had used flour that was left over from preparation of Pizza for my 46th birthday (on 6th July 2016) to make dough for some loaves of bread. But he had NOT followed the recipe we’d borrowed from a YouTube video we originally watched about how to bake bread at home.

Instead he just fooled around a bit and followed his instinct, rather than stick with what we considered the rules. By the time the bread loaves emerged, they were perfect i.e. soft, fluffy and quite tasty.

When the kids came excitedly to show me the loaves, I promptly asked him what he’d done to get that result – which we’d tried unsuccessfully to do before, in that shape and form.

He replied that he could not recall the exact steps he followed. I refused to let him off that easily and instead drilled him with questions until I narrowed down to what he’d done differently, and made a mental note of it.

Tomorrow being his younger brother’s 13th birthday, it was a perfect time to try our hands at the new method for baking the cake. So, this morning they bought all the needed materials from the market, and this time around I led the baking process, stopping at every stage to discuss with them about what to do and how, based on what we’d learnt from last week’s experience.

The result is what you see in the photos below. Super soft and fluffy bread LOAVES baked using our No-Oven Charcoal Stove!!

We’ve since sent tasting samples out to their grandparents, and friends in the estate. Tomorrow they’ll bake more and send to their cousins. However we have a bigger plan, which is to package, promote and sell them in ready-to-eat format. We’re still thinking of what exactly the package will look like, but as you can see we’ve already begun sealing them in nylon packs using our impulse sealer.

The young man in some of the photos is the baby of the family(Tayo Solagbade Junior, who I call “T-Boy”) . He is our “Chief Taster” – none of the baked products escape him

I hope our story will inspire you to spend more time together as a family to create your own products that you can serve to the world as a team.

But if that’s too much, I’m hoping at least, that you’ll try to push your kids to acquire such useful skills, so they can create the future they want!