Green Child Magazine Back-to-School 2012 | Page 22

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.
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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 relative 2