They aren’t giving paper routes out to kids anymore. If there still are papers to be delivered they get adults willing to work for minimum wage to do it. I suppose reliability is a problem when your in a declining industry. I remember kids dumping their papers in the local river rather than have to sort and deliver them 3-5 times a week – so I don’t really blame the newspaper companies for hiring adults.

The world has changed – all the things I did when I was a kid to make money don’t exist anymore. In Canada you can’t even begin to look for a part-time job until you are 14. I suppose this is a big leap in civilization – after all a hundred years ago kids in the western world were working in factories. I could move to Malaysia and perhaps my kids could work for “the gap” – but that’s not happening anytime soon.

As a parent and as a member of Generation X – I am constantly having to make decisions about the safety of my children on the internet without restricting their ability to learn, play or socialize. They only talk to people they know in real life – and are fairly isolated playing games largely on private servers I setup for them.

The other day my kids setup WordPress and began “blogging”. My son is very enterprising – I have had to stop him from attempting to start small businesses – not because I am evil and don’t want him to succeed – but kids at a young age interacting with adults doesn’t make me comfortable – and if I sell his "homemade widgets" for him – he misses out on the experience of being a seller (both my kids are already excellent “buyers”).

The crypto world has flipped the economy upside down as far as I am concerned. I have had to evaluate my own ideas not only about digital assets and their “true value” but also discovering the value is not 100% determined by the price. I think we all know what these benefits are to us as adults – but how could crypto potentially help a kid?

Benefits For Kids

• There is no age limit to buy, sell, mine, trade or launch a cryptocurrency.
• Earning cryptocurrency teaches money management skills in the same digital assets they will likely be using in the future.
• Kids can learn how to trade at any age without any restriction. In a trust account – even if I gave my child the ability to research and make trades – the money is ultimately mine (as are the tax consequences).
• Fortunes will be made over the next 50 years in this space – spend fiat cash – save digital currency is my mantra for them.
• They can use a site like Steemit to potentially post some of their work and hopefully get some rewards to begin building their crypto-portfolios

Benefits For Steemit

• The most successful communities are selectively targeted and grown.
• Kids have access to anywhere from dozens to hundreds of kids (depending where you are from)
• Kids still understand the concept of sharing and would likely be unapologetic in their recruitment.
• It would be a major differentiator from other platforms and options.
• It would put Steem in their hands – which would likely lead to a lifetime of bias toward the coin!

Potential Negatives

• Children are vulnerable
• Scammers might be more inclined to target children
• There might not be enough interest
• Unsupervised – they could get into a lot of trouble with the community

What do you think? What rules would you enforce? My personal feeling is allowing kids to post and allow them to comment – but only when I am with them. They are not on any social media at this point (they don’t need to be) – but Steemit presents a unique opportunity for kids that no other social platform allows. Youtube (I believe) would be their only other option - but I don’t like the idea of exposing my kid’s identities.

I think there is a big opportunity to gain users who will likely stick around by helping to build a community for children. Payouts usually affect “grownups” who come on the site for a couple weeks “get nowhere” and then leave. Kids dream in technicolor – they haven’t been polluted with traditional economic theory. Pennies in a penny jar would still be welcome for a child. The biggest challenge I see is on-boarding other kids (who probably don’t have cell phones). I can buy my kids their accounts but I draw the line at their friends (and it’s up to their parents to monitor) …

I am willing to monitor the “kids” tag as long as the community is willing to accept and support such an initiative. I would love to expand that into a kid curation trail and some contests – but we’ll see how it goes!

If any of you are interested in participating – if you are going to on-board your own kids (or already have) perhaps we could create a list of accounts posting children’s content (so our kids can consume each other’s content and comment).