Money: What All Children Need to Know

2008 April 22 by: Scott

Parenting children to learn to manage money is important. Too many parents avoid this area of teaching until the child is an adult; 18 or older. When we wait to teach children about money, and how to manage it until they’re adults, they learn primarily as a result of their own successes and failures.

Some high schools offer “Personal Finance” classes. The majority of high school students, however, do not select these types of courses because they interfere with other required math classes for college preparation. Many parents report that their money management skills are often not what they’d like them to be or our finances are so complex that how we handle our money doesn’t mean much to a child.

Many children will learn to manage their money through their own personal experiences and the guidance you, as parents, may give them. In other words, children learn from trial and error. Below are some parenting tips that you may want to consider to help you child learn to manage his or her money.

Benefits of an allowance

Having a regular amount of their own income is the only way kids can learn to manage money.
Children need to be able to make mistakes when the cost is minimal.

Knowing the limit of available funds forces kids to:

To think about how much things costs
To make spending choices between the many things that they may want
They have more appreciation for the things they buy when they use their own money