PAULA BEATON
Mother of Jamie Beaton, who was a teenage multimillionaire and runs a $200 million education company, aged 24
The day I confirmed that I was pregnant with Jamie, my husband and I separated. Within a couple of weeks, I became part of a threegenerational family. Jamie was brought up for the first 5 or 6 years by my mum and dad and me. So it was a very, very engaged upbringing. He was the centre of our lives. I think he was lavished with a huge amount of time and energy and enthusiasm and love. It’s that whole idea of it taking a village to bring up children. You can see that very much when you’re talking to Chinese families, just how engaged the grandparents are. Not just in a visiting kind of way but on a day-to-day level. I think because he’s part of a three-generational family, Jamie really sees wisdom in older people in terms of life advice. We always had this idea of giving Jamie loads of activities. Not as in things to spoil him but it might be colouring or it might be writing. I would never just take him to the shops and expect him to be good in the trolley. I think when I started to get some idea that he was somewhat different, in a good way, was that even at 3 and 4 he was really happy to be engaged in all sorts of learning activities. It wasn’t as if it was a chore.
I was really astonished at how young Jamie was when success came but I don’t think I ever doubted that that level of success would come to him, simply because he was so energetic and enthusiastic.
From when Jamie was born, I was always in my own business and, because it was very full-on, Jamie was always part of it. He would often come in weekends to meetings with clients, so he very much saw how business operated. I think that might have been one of the catalysts for what he did later. He would always make suggestions about businesses. Always.
H He was always incredibly … I suppose the word might be “opinionated”. “He always had ideas i on everything.
I would say every child is different. d But in general, apart from fr making sure that they have h loads of different activities, I would absolutely support a high level of engagement with children. For example, I think in Western cultures you do homework in a quiet room or you go away and you play quietly. In our family, Jamie was always in the busy family environment. When Jamie started school, I could tell you exactly what book he was reading. Any speech he was doing at school, I could recite the speech because we were practising it so much.
Advice to new parents? When you look at a rugby game in New Zealand, after the game everyone analyses every try — the people, the player, how they look, everything. When kids do exams or any assignment, get them used to that approach. Every learning opportunity is something to analyse or scrutinise. It’s really healthy competition — not with other people but with yourself. The same competitive analysis that goes into sport, how about looking like that in the education field? I know it sounds like it’s a sacrifice but it’s not really. It’s such a short time. When you have a child, the world is before them and it takes so little to set them on that path.