Why we need to teach our kids about
By Bryce Holdaway
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any of us are all-too-familiar with the egg and spoon balancing act of being a parent. At times, it can feel like we missed the memo and all the other mum and dads out there got the “The Secret Formula to Parenting” manual and we didn’t!
Every time we tap and go with no explanation, we teach our kids - who are looking up at us - that a plastic card is what buys us things
The truth is, while being a parent is one of the most rewarding and amazing things you can ever do in life, it’s equally just as hard to figure out if you’re on the right track to raising curious, kind and clever people who’ll grow up to be tomorrow’s contributing members of society.
account to another through online banking, as well as upload our highlights reel so our friends and family can see, not just what we’re up to, but also how our “status” stacks up.
Sure, this digital age has made our lives more connected and convenient, but it has also come at price. The cost? Every time we tap and go with no explanation, we teach our kids — who are looking up at as — that a plastic card is what buys us things. Every time we tell the cashier to “Put it on credit, thanks” we teach our kids — who are really good listeners when they want to be — that they can have whatever they want without first working for it.
Add to the mix that it’s our job as parents, not only to make sure our kids can hold a fork but also that they’ll be financial responsible when we’re And every time we try to “Keep up with the Joneses”, we teach our kids not there to pick up the bill. — who always pay more attention to what we do than what we say — to value materialistic possessions over true, holistic wealth. Where are parents going wrong? The real cost? Our kids are learning our bad money habits. At first glance, the most common reason we avoid teaching our kids But that’s only half of it. In the digital age they’re growing up in, only 8% of all the money around the world is actually physical cash — the rest is digital money. Why’s that significant? Well, unless they’re exposed to physical money on a regular basis, our But a quick lift of the bonnet reveals that the core of the problem has less kids could miss the important lessons about the value of money to do with a desire to teach them and more to do with lack of confidence itself, such as; What is it?; How does it work?; How do we earn it?; Why is it a limited resource?; Why do we make trade-offs with it?; in our ability to manage money ourselves. and so on. The fact is, we have record levels of household debt in Australia, Add to the fact that they are a generation raised on immediate including over $30 billion dollars in credit card debt, and the vast responses and short term gratification, and you gain a greater majority of us hard-working mums and dads will retire on less than we appreciation of the challenges of managing expectations. did when we received our first entry-level pay check. money lessons — everything from the food on their plate to their beloved iPad was paid for with mum and dad’s money, which was made in exchange for mum and dad’s time — seems simple as so much of our energy is consumed in simply just keeping our kids alive and smiling!
In other words: today’s parents, with easy access to credit and a new What can we do to fix it? reliance on paying with plastic, have lost the ability to effectively The fact is most households don’t generate enough money to have it manage their own money. Sadly, while most of us believe that having a all. Education is key — and by education we mean our kids need to “little bit left over each month” means we’re financially ‘okay’, what we’re understand the context, trade-offs and consequences of our decision often doing is modelling an inferior pathway for our kids to follow. making surrounding money. Teaching kids the value of money also means us parents need to understand the difference between what’s How did we get to this point? ‘our money’ and what’s not; i.e. ‘debt/credit’. There’s no doubt about it: “Keeping up with the Joneses” is arguably harder than ever before. At no point in history have we had such a dependence on technology or had our private lives so visible to the outside world as we do today. With one click of a button, our electronic devices can simultaneously transfer invisible money from one invisible 30
Peninsula Kids – Spring 2019
We get that there’s complexity to each households’ solution, but as parents, we can improve how we manage our own money and open up a transparent dialogue that’s relevant to our kids, which they can comprehend and learn from.