Parents Can Help Children Turn ‘Healthy Struggles’ Into Capability, Confidence in Life: Lee Benson

File photo of a boy doing household chores. (Tomsickova Tatyana/Shutterstock)

Instead of taking challenges away from their children, parents can give them “healthy struggles” that can help build the capabilities and confidence they need to succeed in life, said Lee Benson, a serial entrepreneur and Wall Street Journal best-selling author.

“What we need to get at is to embrace this concept that struggle is actually really good, and trust it,” Benson told EpochTV host Jan Jekielek in a recent interview on “American Thought Leaders.”

Growing up in a low-income family in eastern Washington State in the early 1940s, Benson was kicked out of his parents’ house as a high school senior. But by that point, he was already financially competent and independent, thanks to many “healthy struggles” he had already overcome.

Embrace the ‘Value Creation’ World View

“When I was 7 years old, I was approached by a neighbor unsolicited, and she asked, ‘Would you be willing to pull weeds in my garden for 25 cents an hour?’ Back then, with 25 cents, I could buy two candy bars and still have change,” Benson recalled. “So I started doing that. It was hard work.”

This marked the start of what Benson called a “value creation cycle.” As a young child, he moved to try many other different jobs, including shoveling people’s driveways and sidewalks, running newspaper routes, and cleaning tables at a restaurant.

“Starting at seven years old, embracing this value creation struggle cycle, there was nothing I thought I couldn’t accomplish,” he said.

“I didn’t feel like a victim,” Benson told Jekielek, noting that the environment he grew up in was “kind of a toxic and dangerous environment,” with a younger brother in and out of prison and a lot of other family members who “just really weren’t good people.”

“So even with all of that going on, this outside world of creating value and taking bigger and bigger steps each time saved me in the biggest possible way,” said Benson, who has so far founded seven multi-million-dollar companies.

Some of Benson’s siblings didn’t fare as well. “They stayed in that environment,” he said. “They didn’t have this external value creation way of looking at the world.”

The Three Types of Values

“When I think about value creation, there are three main buckets,” Benson explained. “There’s material value creation, there’s emotional energy value creation, and there’s spiritual value creation. So figure out which bucket, or combination of buckets, you want to create value in.”

The most powerful of all three, according to Benson, is emotional energy value creation, which he described as a “supercharger for everything.”

“For me, for decades, the scarcest commodity on the planet is positive emotional energy,” he said. “When it’s running on nine or 10, all kinds of bad things can happen, obstacles come up, but it’s no big deal. I’m going to blow through it and it’s going to be amazing. When it’s running on one, you get a flat tire and it ruins your week.”

Designing Healthy Struggles for Children

In his recently published book “Value Creation Kid: The Healthy Struggles Your Children Need to Succeed,“ Benson and co-author Scott Donnell encourage parents to use ”healthy struggles” to help their children adopt a worldview where the emphasis is not on victimhood, but on how to turn struggle into something valuable for themselves and others.

“For a child, the healthy struggle could be just learning how to make and manage money,” Benson told Jekielek. “How do I earn it? How do I save it? How do I give it? How do I share it? So this is a capability that they want to go after.”

The book details a roadmap for parents who wish to unlock their child’s “value creation superpower.” Any family, including low-income families with both parents working, can and should try a four-part method, Benson said.

The first part is to talk to the child about value creation, which Benson recommended to start as early as before kindergarten age. The second part is house rules, particularly concerning the child’s role in the family, as well as the growing expectation and expenses over time.

“As you’re looking at the child’s advancing, you’ve got the expectations and expenses,” he said. “So as they get older, they pick up more of their own expenses.”

“Then we have financial competency. It’s not just financial literacy. Learning about this stuff without applying doesn’t really matter at all,” Benson noted. “The last part is healthy struggle: How do we design healthy struggles for our children so they can build these skills over time?”

Parents may want to give their child “home gigs,” or jobs the child can do to earn money beyond their expected roles in the home, Benson said.

“Let’s give them jobs. We call them ‘action gigs’ and ’brain gigs,‘” he explained. “An action gig is, ’We‘ll pay you extra money to wash the car, but we’re not going to pay you any more than I could get it done down the street at the carwash.’ It’s got to be fair market value to teach those lessons. So as the money comes in, they can pick up their expenses.”

“Now they’re learning this, which isn’t something we can explain once. But if you create this sort of way the family operates, they‘ll start discovering their superpower. They’ll learn how to make and manage money. And by the time they’re launched into adulthood, they’re going to be financially competent.”

While the strategy sounds simple enough, it might not be so easy for everyone to adhere to the value creation worldview and overcome healthy struggles in real life.

“When I talked to adults about the concepts in the book around healthy struggle, all of them said it makes so much sense and that every family should do this,” Benson said. “Yet, when these adults are running businesses and something doesn’t go perfect—almost always because they didn’t have the capability to do this thing well—they act like a victim rather than embracing this healthy struggle to navigate this challenging time better next time it comes up in their business, and to build their confidence so they can use that to create even more value.”

But for those who remain on course and embrace healthy struggles, Benson said, it’s unlikely they will ever stop reaping the benefits this life strategy can offer.

“If you get on this track to create value—whether it’s material, emotional, or spiritual—and you want to create more and more value each time, I theorize and fully believe that once you get on that road, you will never get off.”