If you remember our post Children and Cooking: Creating the Entrepreneurial Spirit, I shared with you how I was going to build a cooking empire until my budding culinary kingdom like Cheech and Chong went “Up in Smoke”.  Well, what I failed to mention was what happened only a couple of months after the smoke cleared from my disintegrated food business.

In summary, I hired what I thought was my first unpaid intern whom I later discovered possessed a keenly sophisticated twisted negotiation acumen.  My first unpaid intern, my extortionist sister, doubled as a Girl Scout or Brownie.  I can’t remember which one exactly.  So for the purposes of this story feel free to pick whichever one you want.

All that I can clearly remember is that she belonged to one of those strangely dressed group of girls who bug the heck out you, knocking on your door trying to sell you boxes of cookies that you don’t need and that your waist line can’t afford.  So whether my sister wore the brown outfit or wore the green outfit is really irrelevant to this story.  The fact that she belonged to one of those insufferable group of little girls in those ridiculous outfits is what matters in this story.

Less is S’more

During the same fall that my cooking empire collapsed, my sister attended some kind of Brownie/Girl Scout sleep over.  At the sleepover all the Brownie/Girl Scouts huddled like moths around a campfire.  During that campfire excursion, my sister was introduced to some treat that was – at least until she returned home – foreign in my neighborhood.

During that offbeat cult like campfire gathering, my sister was introduced to and learned how to make S’mores.  In case, you are unfamiliar with S’mores – as I was until my sister introduced them to me – I’ll take only a second to describe them.  S’mores are a dessert made with a roasted marshmallow and a layer of chocolate sandwiched between two pieces of graham crackers.  S’mores was the abbreviated version of the words Some More.

When she returned home, my sister could not shut up talking about those darn S’mores.  Unable to get her sleeping bag and gear in the house fully, she ranted and raved about the taste of the S’mores.  She was as excited about the S’mores as anytime that I could remember with the exception of the times she would tell on me and watch me get jacked up for doing something that I wasn’t supposed to be doing.

At her insistence we made S’mores that evening.  How did we make S’mores with no campfire?  Well if you have been reading all the cooking posts, you know that I was banned from flammable liquids and fires for the duration of the time that I lived at home.  So there would be no making S’mores by the fire for us.  We had to make our S’mores the unconventional way, in the oven.

As I savored the taste of my first S’more I thought “what’s the big deal?”  Was I missing something?  Maybe I had to be a girl dressed in a silly brown or green uniform to understand the S’mores significance.

The S’mores were good for a quick chocolate fix and a sugar rush but come on.  Really?  Certainly, my sister didn’t think the S’mores were better than any of the chocolate cakes my mother baked.   With that, I thanked my sister for sharing her S’mores with me and I went to bed giving no further thought to S’mores.

Just Say No

Conversely, I learned the next morning that my sister had given lots of thought to those darn S’mores.  When I went outside later that morning, I found that all of the neighborhood kids were looking for their S’mores fix.  I mean these kids were feening for a fix like S’mores junkies.  You should have seen all the kids standing on corners, drooling and shaking at the mere word S’more.  Kids were holding up signs that read things like “I’ll work for S’mores” , “Poor and S’more-less”, “Take my little brother/sister for a S’more” and “Can you spare a S’more?”

Evidently, before I could wake from my S’mores induced sugar coma, get out of bed and go outside my little sister – like all the great marketers/extortionists/pharmaceutical sales representatives (both legal and illegal) – had distributed samples of the leftover S’mores from the night before to all the neighborhood kids.  For a S’mores fix the neighborhood kids were taking money out of their piggy banks and stealing money from their sibling’s piggy banks.  Kids from my neighborhood were looking for spare change from every location in their houses – from in between couch pillows to the secret emergency money stashes hidden in the sock drawers in their parents’ dressers.

The scene was unreal.  These kids wanted S’mores.  No these kids needed S’mores.  They were hooked and my sister had turned the entire neighborhood into S’mores junkies.

For the Love of Barbie

I don’t know how many batches of S’mores we made that day or how much money my sister made.  This time I was her unpaid intern and I wasn’t privy to her financial reports.  Worse than being my baby sister’s unpaid intern was that I have no idea how many poor neighborhood kids she turned into S’mores junkies.  I’ve felt terrible ever since that day and have prayed that the poor S’mores addicts from my old neighborhood were able to get help.  A few time when I have gone home, I have driven through my old neighborhood to see if I could find some of my neighbors to apologize for what my sister did to them.  Unfortunately, like Zombie’s they are far too gone and neither understand what I am saying nor do they don’t recognize me.  Stay away from the S’mores.  Trust me, I’ve seen it first hand – a S’more addiction can be almost impossible to recover.

One thing is for certain, the neighborhood S’mores addiction was no accident.  I am fairly certain that my sister concocted the devious plan the moment she was introduced to S’mores during the peculiar cult like campfire.  While the other strangely dressed little girls were enjoying their time together singing nonsensical songs by the campfire, my sister had designs on her own taste of capitalistic greed.

She was determined to introduce S’mores to the neighborhood and turn a massive profit.  My sister had Barbie dolls and Barbie’s Dream Home to buy and nothing was going to deter her not even the lasting effect S’mores addiction could have on her friends and our neighborhood.

What If?

Seriously, when I think about my sister’s S’mores enterprise and my summer restaurant venture, I wonder what would have happened if those two empire-building interests had been fully developed.  I wonder how things might have turned out differently if my father was a successful chef and encouraged me to pursue cooking for a living.  What a novelty I might have been, a teenage young man with his own restaurant?

How unique my sister might have been if my mother was a wealthy venture capitalist who could help my sister mass produce her tasty child produced drug, I meant dessert.  All the children of the world might be slaves to my sister’s S’mores.  Who knows maybe my sister and I would have been world renown like Julia Child and Emeril Lagasse.

The question of what would have happen if my parents were capable of helping my sister and I develop our moments of entrepreneurial spirit is not a question that I ask about my sister and me at the micro level.  By most standards my sister and I turned out okay.  But could things have been different, more efficient, better?  I ask the question in the macro sense.  I wonder how much individual potential never gets developed in America.  Moreover, I wonder how much individual potential is ignored in America.

The Beatles or the Next Bill Gates?

Does your child have a hobby or interest that could be developed into a skill?  Are you planning to do anything to develop that hobby or interest or are you merely going to watch it go up in smoke like my parent’s backyard?

If your child has a hobby or interest you should immediately start trying to help them to develop it into a skill.  According to Dr. K. Anders Ericsson if your child is willing to dedicate a minimum of 10,000 hours to deliberate practice and improving their skills (hobby or interest) they would be well on their way to becoming an expert.

Now I know 10,000 hours sounds like a lot of time but it is only 20 hours a week for ten years.  Compare the time that it would take for your child to become an expert to the amount of time American children spend watching TV.

Nielsen reports that American children spend more than an entire day each and every week watching television.  Children between the ages two to five watch more than 32 hours per week.  Children between the ages of six to eleven watch more than 28 hours per week.  For those of you counting at home that’s an average of 30 hours per week or 15,000 hours of television in ten years.  At the aforementioned average of 30 hours per week, a child from the ages of two to eighteen will watch more than 24,000 hours of television.

What does this all mean?  It means that American children sit in front of the television much too long.  Eight to twelve additional wasted hours that could be used to become an expert at something worthwhile.  An extra 8 to 12 hours each week used to become experts at Nickelodeon, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, The Walking Dead, Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, playing video games and more useless television stuff.  It means that ALL our children could be doing incredible things if we, the parents, stopped ignoring the potential of ALL our children and instead provided ALL our children with the tools to FOCUS, climate to PRACTICE and the requisite MENTORSHIP  to turn their hobbies and interests into fully developed skills.

Are your children improving and extending the reach and range of their existing skills or are you allowing your children to waste 24,000 hours watching television?