How to Raise Kids with
Healthy Money Beliefs By Sharon O’Day
And off we go again, hearing how the damsel in distress was swept off her feet by her charming prince … and lived happily ever after. Unfortunately, that’s probably one of the most insidious things we can put in our little girls’ heads. Yet it was put in ours, and it seems harmless enough to pass along. What our parents didn’t realize (but we do today) is that those long-ago, childhood memories were often left in that less-visited portion of our brains: the subconscious. And, in many cases, the memories have had long-lasting, sometimes devastating effects on our adult lives. Money Gremlins & Where They Come From Let’s look at how that works: From birth to age six, we function almost entirely from our subconscious minds. That is, we have no real ability to judge what’s going on around us. Therefore, everything we hear and experience, every interchange with others, absolutely everything lands in our little subconscious minds, like throwing everything into a huge bucket. 22
Remember that we all have a biological imperative to survive. So whether we’re functioning from our conscious brains or not, we’re wired to constantly respond to anything that threatens us. (Conversely, we’re attracted to whatever increases our chances to survive.) At the same time, as infants just learning how the world functions, we soak up everything our parents, siblings and relatives do. They are our role models, after all, our only resource. What we see as memorable incidents could include something as innocent as hearing our parents fighting over money and believing we are somehow the cause. Maybe our cousins have toys our parents can’t afford to buy us, and our parents make disparaging comments about our “rich relatives.” Maybe our fathers are always absent, but bring us expensive gifts to show us they love us. Or maybe our mothers unintentionally plant scarcity thoughts in us. Say we grab that yummy treat at the market and she says, “I don’t have any money for that. I barely have enough to put food on the table” … Whatever the incidents, we each installed millions of these impressions in our infant brains and called them Truth. (I call them Gremlins because of the mischief I see them causing my clients as adults when it comes to dealing with money.)
Photography by Jacqie Q
“Read it to me one more time, Mommy.”