According to the survey “Female Entrepreneurship”, conducted by the Brazilian Service for Support to Micro and Small Enterprises (Sebrae) in 2024, more than half (67%) of entrepreneurs in Brazil have children. They reconcile the mission of undertaking and generating income to maternity care, and assume one more role: to inspire and teach entrepreneurship to their own children.
Although the role of education is not only mothers, women who run businesses can include, from early childhood, habits in the routine to develop adults with skills to deal with money. The family environment is one of the first that the child will have interaction, and it is in it that the young should feel safe enough to learn to deal with money and other issues related to financial health.
“At home is a reliable and comfortable environment to talk about finances and still be sure of what is being taught. What we perceive in social networks and TV, is a bombardment of misinformation, guiding on gambling, easy money gain, low investments with miraculous returns and unbridled spending. Are producing young people who buy on impulse, easily indebted with easy access to credit, especially in digital banks, and with little or no knowledge about investments”, says Vanessa Cristiane Motta de Matos, founding partner of Investeendo.
The entrepreneur is one of the founding partners of the startup that teaches financial and entrepreneurial education to children and adolescents, through physical and digital gamification, which unites the playful and the teachings on topics such as safe investments, loans and buying and selling. Investeendo, recognized for its innovation, was created with his daughter, Mariana Motta de Matos and the other partner, Sam Adam Hoffmann, at the end of 2022, and since then has impacted more than 6 thousand young people in three Brazilian states, with the use of more than 40 digital and physical games and participated in various initiatives, such as the Shark Tank Brazil program.
Financial teaching during childhood
Although the professional life of mother and daughter only come together in the social business, the teachings on entrepreneurship began well before and at home, still in adolescence.“From an early age, my mother talked and taught me about what to do to receive money, how to spend and how much to save so that I could buy something that I wanted very”, says Mariana.
The business administrator recalls that when she began to understand the value of things and wanted to earn her own money, her mother supported her to start her business at school.“I was underage and could not have a conventional job, so we had the idea of starting to sell brigadeiro's ball gourmet. I produced and sold in the intervals of classes. On the first day I sold absolutely everything, on the second, everything too, and I had to start increasing my production to account for the demand. We did together cost and profit analysis and put on paper how much I needed to save for my larger goal. A few months passed and I was able to buy my first cell phone, and the best: with my own money”.
In addition to the support in the first business, Vanessa always taught her daughter in a playful and fun way. “As a mother, I always worried about the financial education that I should give to Mari early, because the schools do not teach and this is a certainty in life: that we will deal with money at some point. When she was little, we had in the refrigerator a ’s, very simple and easy to follow. There were three columns, in the first paid attitudes, in the second the value she would receive for the fulfillment of each one of them and in the third what made her lose money, for example: answer the parents”.
Growing up and clearly understanding her relationship with money, Mariana observed that other young people her age did not have the same understanding, in addition to distorted values on the subject. In this way, she was willing to talk to them about finances in schools in the interior of Parana. In one of these meetings, they met Sam, a public school teacher, and soon became partners with the aim of teaching financial education in a gamified and fun way.
Small habits to teach financial notions inside the home
Currently, Brazil has more than 73 million indebted, according to a survey conducted by Serasa. To ensure that young people become adults with financial awareness and do not get into debt, they must learn from childhood. “For a child of 04 years, two R$2 notes are worth more than a note of R$10. They understand that the amount of notes is worth more than the nominal value of the note. So when they are on the market, parents can ask the child to choose only one thing. Note that we do not talk about money, but rather, the attitude of the child towards the choices, Vanessa explains.
The banker and businesswoman points out that according to the growth of the child, attitudes, which should become routine habits, change. “For older children, it is important to give them a value and say that there is only him to spend. It is important to be firm if the choices become more expensive, and suggest that if she wants something more expensive, save the value for the next trip to the shopping”.
Parallel to the tips, paid activities are also important ways to teach. “The most important thing is to understand that the whole family is responsible for finances. A child should not work to contribute some income, but she can turn off a light, close a faucet, take care of toys and not waste. Show her the water bill and explain that if she saves X real account, it will be possible to go to the cinema once a month, since she helped in the economy”, suggests Vanessa.