Parents Need to Know How to Teach Kids the Value of Money

The following is a guest post by Tina Roth. Tina is a personal finance blogger at Pro Finance Blog, who loves to write about money management and saving habits.

Children start learning from the age of 2 or 3; they learn from the environment they grow up. Responsible parents provide them with a healthy learning environment and instill an enthusiasm for learning into them.

But there’s something that even the most responsible of them tend to ignore, which is, teaching kids about money. According to child psychologists, kids should be taught about money from a very tender age.

A tabula rasa

Such is the mind of a child, and what’s intriguing is the initial scratch marks that disturb the blank state, stays there forever (Maybe not forever, but for a very long time). Whatever education a child receives, be it good education or bad education – stays with him.

If parents are extravagant or irresponsible with money, so would be their kids. The learning styles of children are unique, their learning circuits are more active than their parents could imagine. They learn from everything around them. So parents need to act responsibly with money, and follow the tips given below:

Play money games

One way to make kids responsible with money is playing games with them – games that are apparently silly but has a deep and sublime lesson to deliver, a lesson that relates to money.

One such game is coin identification. The game is played with toddlers, who learn to distinguish between nickel, dime and cents. Kids remember the names of the coins and the symbols on them. How can this game benefit them? By teaching them how to count money.

Games that involve savings are more helpful; those games should be played with 5-year olds. Kids should be given a target of savings. If they succeed in meeting the target, rewards should be handed to them. Rewards serve as motivation. Playing such games at an early age can turn kids into habitual savers when they grow up.

Affordability signals

Kids have an innate ability, they can sense anxiety, disapproval, anger and other negative emotions in adults. They even react to those emotions. If parents display negative emotions while dealing with money related matters, kids will learn it, which is why, parents should never give negative affordability signals.

What type of signal is negative affordability signal? Kids often ask for toys or superhero costumes, which are expensive; their requests meet with rejection. When they ask parents why are they not buying the stuff, parents reply they can’t afford it. Such replies are negative affordability signals.

Instead of giving such replies, parents should tell their kids that they can buy it, but choose not to buy because there are better and wiser ways to spend money. What are those ways? You may ask. This takes us to our next point:

Good and bad investment

Children should be taught about good and bad ways to invest money, so that they don’t take wrong investment decisions later in life. When conversing with an adult, you can describe an investment as good or bad investment in terms of the result it produces – profit or loss. But with kids, you need to take a separate route.

Describe safe investments as good investments and unsafe investments as bad investments. This is by far the most logical way to categorize investments. Tell stories to your kids and let them process those stories.

Tell them stories of stock market investments, how sloppy investors ended up broke overnight. Tell those stories to your kids painting risky investments as bad as safe investments as good. But there’s a risk that such stories will make them risk averse. How to eliminate the risk?

Struggle and wisdom

You can eliminate the risk if you connect money to struggle and wisdom. Teach your kids the truth about money, that earning money requires a lot of hard-work and wise investment decisions.

True, there are shortcuts, but shortcuts are either ethically wrong or legally wrong or both. Your kids may have a penchant for quick ways to earn money and the media and the pop culture may fuel it, but if you convince him that choosing shortcuts can never lead to financial freedom, then he might eventually suppress his proclivity for shortcuts.

Once again, tell him stories of successful people whose struggle and perseverance have led them to success. Such people are Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Chris Gardener, Steve Jobs, etc. Buy your kids books that highlight on the motivational aspects of rich people, so not only their wealthy lifestyle but the ladders they climbed be known to your kid.

It takes time

The purpose of teaching kids about money is make them equipped to handle money-management in their adult life. This is a complicated process and will take time. Responsible parents need to act patiently and monitor the progress. The tips given above can be of help.