Money and Children

<< back to Money and Children, pt.2


Take it slowly

Rome wasn’t built in a day, they say, and neither will you teach your child all the important values and skills about money overnight. Patience will be one of your biggest assets in this journey with your child and the emphasis should be on guiding and encouraging rather than dictating and lecturing. As with many lessons that your child learns throughout his or her life, when they learn it for themselves it’s much more likely to have an impact and be remembered. Let your child learn about money through the safety of trial and error in the home. Encourage the successes, guide through the failures (don’t lecture or castigate), and introduce new concepts only when you feel the child is ready to move to the next step. It is also vitally important to make sure that you speak to the child in terms that they can relate to, and not as an adult.

Where should you start to teach your child about money? Where should you finish? Should you teach your child by paying them money in exchange for chores? Should you give them an allowance each week? How fast should you teach them? What are your expectations?

These are just some of the many questions parents should ask themselves and discuss with each other before setting down the road of teaching your child about money. If you both have a clear understanding about the message you’re trying to deliver, and if you can deliver is consistently, your child wont be subjected to mixed messages.

One of the most important things to keep in mind when setting out your boundaries is that there is no right way and no wrong way to teach your child about money and there is no official starting point or end goal. If you treat it as a fluid exercise, and one where the rules keep changing as you go along (there was no need to explain to children about mobile phones 10 years ago), then you’ll be better prepared to adjust to conditions as they arise.