West Ridge Academy’s Recommendations For Teaching Your Child About Financial Literacy
In life, money is an absolute necessity. West Ridge Academy says that you cannot just disregard it however by hiding behind worn-out clichés such as “money is the root of all evil”, or whatever adage that paints money as if it’s something that you should stay away from. The truth is money can either be your friend or your enemy depending upon how you treat it; and whether you take good care of it or if you spend it like there’s no tomorrow as soon as you lay your hands on it. If you treat money well, it can be your friend and will even work for you by multiplying itself several times over if you know where to invest it. On the other hand, if you do not understand how it works then it will definitely come back to haunt you, run you into the ground and bury you with all sorts of debts and financial trouble if you are not careful. If you love your children, you must teach them about financial literacy as soon as possible so that they won’t find themselves in financial trouble when they become adults. West Ridge Academy suggests a couple of activities below which will help you educate your child about financial literacy as early as possible.
Give your child a weekly allowance and hold him accountable for it. By giving your child a weekly allowance, you are subtly teaching him how to budget. Figure out an amount that is just enough to cover his basic needs for one week and give it to him as his weekly allowance. Tell him that it should last him for an entire week because you won’t be giving him any additional money if runs out and comes up short, unless of course there’s a perfectly acceptable explanation why he fell short of his budget. Whatever money he can save will be his to keep and he can use it for whatever purpose that he would like.
Encourage him to save some of his allowance in order to buy something that he really wants to have like a favorite toy or bike. This way he will learn a lot of financially relevant ideas, such as: the economic impact of choosing the lower-priced food or treats (but not necessarily lower in nutritional value) in order to save some of his allowance; or the fact that it’s not easy to accumulate money since it actually takes a certain amount of sacrifice to save for even just a small amount; perhaps he will learn to value his toys even more since he will realize that the money that was used to buy them did not just come out of thin air, but were actually worked hard for by his parents, in the same manner that he is sacrificing now just to have that toy or bike that he likes.
Try to play educational board games which will teach your child about financial basics. Games such as Monopoly, Life, or other games that have financial relevance, can be fun and at the same time very educational ways of teaching your child about
some of the financial basics. He will surely have lots of questions for you while playing the game, so try to answer all his questions if possible and explain as clearly as possible in order to make him understand the general concepts. Try to use simple real-life examples which he can relate to, in order to illustrate the concepts to him. West Ridge Academy says that by the end of the game, he will not only be walking away from the table with much more knowledge, but also with much more respect for you because of your effort in teaching him about financial literacy.