How do I help my kid without taking over their business?

The instinct that gets parents in trouble is a good one. You can see the problem, you know the answer, and watching your kid struggle with something you could fix in nine seconds is genuinely uncomfortable. So you fix it. And the business quietly becomes yours.

The move that works is a question instead of an answer. Four of them cover most situations. What do you think you should charge? What would you do if they say no? Who else might want this? What went wrong, and what will you do differently next time?

None of those are clever. They work because they hand the decision back. A kid who decided their own price defends it to a customer. A kid whose parent set the price folds the moment someone pushes.

The other half is the failure question. Your kid will get something wrong in a way that costs them a customer or twenty dollars. If you cover it, they learn that mistakes get absorbed by someone else. If you let it land and then help them work out what happened, they learn what the mistake actually cost, which is the entire lesson.

Safety net, not operator. You catch the falls that would end the whole thing. You do not catch the ones that only sting.