Kids & Money: Putting Baby on a Budget?

There are many schools of thought when it comes to teach­ing chil­dren about finances.  It seems to me that a very large per­cent of PF blog­gers and main­stream par­ents ascribe to a “the sooner the bet­ter” phi­los­o­phy.  This is no sur­prise to me since our soci­ety at-large tends to take this stance on every­thing related to chil­dren.  The sooner they read, the bet­ter.  The sooner they start talk­ing, the bet­ter.  The sooner they wean, walk, start school (fill in the blank), the better.

It may not sur­prise my reg­u­lar read­ers to learn that I do not ascribe to this school of thought.  I think that chil­dren are chil­dren.  They are not minia­ture adults.  And they are not even minia­ture adults-in-training.

To my think­ing, finance and money issues belong in the adult world.  They are adult issues.  And I feel very strongly that we do our chil­dren no favors by intro­duc­ing them to the com­plex­i­ties of finances at an early age, much less the stresses, wor­ries, and eth­i­cal issues relat­ing to money.

I believe a child’s work is to play, to cre­ate, and to imag­ine. There will be plenty of time to teach chil­dren the ins and outs of money and finances when it’s more devel­op­men­tally appropriate.

In the mean­time, chil­dren learn a lot about money, finances, fru­gal­ity, and the ethics of money sim­ply by watch­ing their par­ents spend money (but that, my friends, is an entirely sep­a­rate post in and of itself).

Sure, chil­dren fig­ure out pretty quickly that those coins and that paper and those rec­tan­gu­lar plas­tic things some­how relate to good­ies.  And sure, we adults can intel­lec­tu­al­ize with chil­dren and lec­ture them and even get them to par­rot cer­tain facts about money.  But a child, with a child’s mind and a child’s per­spec­tive and a child’s innocence, simply can­not com­pre­hend and appre­ci­ate the world of money.  Even more so, why should they?

I felt no com­punc­tion about con­vey­ing to my young chil­dren (up to age 6) that money and the act of buy­ing things was some­thing that adults did.  In our family, children did not spend money nor make money nor even pos­sess money.  This is not to say that the pos­ses­sion of money was strictly for­bid­den.  I’m sure my chil­dren each had a col­lec­tion of coins they found around the house or in pub­lic places (shoot, those munchkins are so much closer to the ground than we are, they’re experts at find­ing dropped coins).  How­ever, those coin col­lec­tions were no more sig­nif­i­cant to them than the other items they col­lected:  sea shells, bits of col­ored rib­bon, bot­tle caps, pretty stones, etc.  My kids knew that, the­o­ret­i­cally, the coins car­ried a value that, say, bits of col­ored rib­bon didn’t but that was in the adult world, not their own mag­i­cal child­hood worlds. 

Yes, some of the kids around them were receiv­ing allowances or spend­ing pocket change on candy selec­tions but my chil­dren were no strangers to the fact that our fam­ily often did things dif­fer­ently than the way the neigh­bors and school mates’ fam­i­lies did things.  [I have since dis­cussed some of these dif­fer­ences with my chil­dren and nei­ther pro­fess to have been per­ma­nently scarred by my some­what un-orthodox par­ent­ing deci­sions; influ­enced, yes, but not scarred.  ]

Again, I’d like to empha­size, the use and pos­ses­sion of coins was not for­bid­den in our family; rather the use of money was an adult activ­ity just as dri­ving was an adult activity. 

I under­stand that not every par­ent feels com­fort­able draw­ing lines between parental priv­i­leges and children’s rights.  I’m not among them.  In our house, Dad drank Coke but the kids didn’t (no caf­feine).  In our house, the kids wore what mom had laid out or required — that meant that The Daugh­ter wore a coat or The Son wore boots and not san­dals if mom said so.  In our fam­ily there was a dif­fer­ence between the dessert por­tions served to adults and chil­dren, and as much as it scan­dal­ized my sis­ter, it was even accept­able for adults to declare to the chil­dren that a given night was not dessert night only to have the adults break out the ice cream after the chil­dren were in bed.  In our fam­ily The Hus­band and I some­times said, “because I said so” and that was that. 

If you’re still read­ing this post and haven’t yet aban­doned it is irrel­e­vant, per­haps my ulti­mate goals would inter­est you.

1. I felt that expos­ing my chil­dren to the com­plex­i­ties of per­sonal finance was unnec­es­sary at a young age.  I had faith that even if we delayed lessons in per­sonal finance they would still have plenty of time to learn every­thing they needed to know about money by the time they left home.
2. I wanted my chil­dren to grow up with a sense that money and all mat­ters relat­ing to money are seri­ous and com­plex.  Han­dling money isn’t child’s play.
3. I wanted to delay their desire for the acqui­si­tion of goods as long as pos­si­ble (see my car­di­nal rule for shop­ping with kids).
4. I didn’t want my children’s first expe­ri­ences with “sav­ing” money to be in any way asso­ci­ated with even­tu­ally spend­ing (as in sav­ing an allowance for a num­ber of weeks in order to buy some­thing even big­ger and better).

Please under­stand, I’m not say­ing that chil­dren shouldn’t han­dle money until they’re 16 or 18 or, heaven for­bid, 21.  I’m just say­ing that I decided to wait until my chil­dren were school-aged before begin­ning to cre­ate and encour­age any rela­tion­ship to or inter­est in money and finances. 

When our old­est was seven, we decided that it was time for her to learn to save money.  In a bank.  As I described last week, shortly after her 7th birth­day, The Daugh­ter and I vis­ited a local bank and opened a cus­to­dial sav­ings account.  Also at this time, we started giv­ing her a weekly allowance.  So now she was receiv­ing money and sav­ing money.  The priv­i­lege of spend­ing money, how­ever, was still a full year away.  More on that next week.  Stay tuned…

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