How We Used Talent, Skills, and Passion to Create Successful Kids
Following an online curriculum or stack of textbooks can’t guarantee your children’s success after they graduate. It certainly wouldn’t instill passion, talent or extremely marketable skills.
My husband and I married with college debt, advanced degrees, and no big promise of a dependable job that we loved.
We didn’t want that for our kids.
So, as each of our children turned the age of 12, my husband started to identify each child’s passions and interests. He would then hijack the curriculum we used, the time we had each day, and our local resources and assets to develop their interests into marketable skills and talents. Read on to find out the results. They’re pretty amazing!
What started as an experiment has now turned into a family of extreme talent, with high schoolers graduating with advanced skills in high demand that they can take to the workforce or further education.
Meet the Talent
Jonathan Jr (age 22) had his eye behind a camera and his hands on a guitar at around the age of 14. He combined both passions to create videos. At 16, he bought his first drone, became talented at video editing, and by the time he graduated, was running his own business doing drone videography for realtors. He’s now contracted by utility and cell companies to film power and cell lines. He’s been all across the United States with his business.
Caleb (age 20) collected stones and agates as a child. Studying gems and fine stones for jewelry opened the doors to apprentice with a couple of jewelry makers. From there, he turned his passion for knife-making to create a forge in our garage. He built an Instagram following of over 13,000 people, showcased his talent, and sold his handcrafted knives. A knife company found him and hired him, and then he moved on to a machine company, where he currently works.
Nicholas (age 18) is currently in demand as a computer coder, working both for a company that “fixes blogs” and for prestigious bloggers who need his technical help with all things related to the back end of websites. It all started with the purchase of a small, single-board computer called a Raspberry Pi when he was a young teen.
Nicholas’ twin sister Noelle was passionate about drawing at a very young age. She, too, started an Instagram account as a teenager, showcasing her talent and her artistic development. She’s often commissioned by bloggers and podcasters to create digital images that reflect the company and the products they deliver.
Our youngest graduate so far is 16-year-old Gideon. He ships our packages and has streamlined a lot of our processes over the past six months. He also works part-time for a machine shop that does prototype work for Google and Facebook. His passion for entrepreneurship and his talent for all things mechanical grabbed the attention of the local machinist to land him his dream job.
How to develop passion and talent in your children
When we made MadeOn our full-time family income, my husband took over the majority of the homeschooling. He developed his unique method that we like to say is talent and passion-based homeschooling… something he begins when our children turn 12.
He’s in the process of putting together all of his resources into a new website. If you’d like to be notified when his site goes live, email him here: jonathan@parenttheirpassion.com