What if a child’s “cute little booth” is actually the most powerful classroom they’ll ever enter? Julie sits down with Leah Ellis, founder of the Society of Child Entrepreneurs, to unpack how real-world selling, smart storytelling, and low-risk practice can turn kids into confident builders who know how to pitch, price, pivot, and persevere.
Leah shares how painful labels in her own childhood led her to therapy, reparenting, and a mission to change the words kids hear about themselves. That clarity drives a unique program where children ages six to seventeen learn entrepreneurship, leadership, and financial literacy through a blend of narrative-based lessons and hands-on fairs. The results are surprising and delightful: a teen jeweler with serious design chops, a 3D-printing creator, a pin maker who sold out at a zoo gift shop, and a 13-year-old book lover curating genre bundles with custom top-10 bookmarks.
We also dig into the bigger system. Only a few U.S. states protect kid-run ventures with lemonade stand laws, and Kansas isn’t one of them, yet. Leah walks us through the bill she drafted to expand freedom and safeguard earnings so families can say yes to more than two sales events a year. Along the way, we talk about parents as partners, not sole instructors, and how this education complements school by teaching application, communication, and resilience.
If you care about youth empowerment, small business skills, and practical financial literacy, this conversation will shift how you see a child’s idea. Subscribe, share with a parent or teacher, and leave a review to help more families discover hands-on entrepreneurship that starts today.
Check out https://societyofchildentrepreneurs.org/
If this conversation stirred something in you… good. That’s where change begins.
Make sure you’re subscribed, share this with someone who needs it, and if you’re ready to tell your story, step into your voice, or build a life that actually feels like yours… You’re in the right place.
I’m Julie Fairhurst, and this is where stories turn into power.
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