Green Child Magazine Back-to-School 2012 | Page 24

How to Raise Kids with

Healthy Money Beliefs

We had no tools to decide what was right or
wrong. Instead, we just left each impression
there, whether it was rational or not. Then, as
we grew older and acquired the skills of critical thinking, we never bothered to go back
and revisit all those old impressions. Many no
longer affect us: they were innocuous or they
got disproved as we grew up. But, like it or
not, some of the more damaging Gremlins that
were never addressed still seep into the decisions we make today in the form of emotional
mischief.
The Power of Knowledge
Now that we know how that works, we have
two tremendous opportunities. First, we can
remain vigilant about how our kids might perceive events that, as adults, we consider perfectly harmless. That might seem like a massive task, but becoming a parent is a massive
responsibility. And today we’re aware of things
our parents never even considered.
We know what obstacles we could be creating
for our kids’ future well being. From a little
girl who grows up to believe she deserves to
find a prince who will take care of her, so she
abdicates her power around money … to little
boys who become workaholics—putting family
relationships at risk—because they can never
have enough money.

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Second, we can plant healthy impressions in
our kid’s brains, from infancy onward. Instead
of telling little girls they don’t need to be good
at math, as our mothers did, we can encourage
them to involve numbers in many of their activities. That will keep their math skills active
so they won’t shut them down as so typically
happens in the early teen years. The result will
be to remove a huge barrier to being empowered around money.

If we do read fairy tales to our daughters, we
can alternate them with stories in which little
girls are celebrated for taking care of themselves. (Little boys will benefit as well, as they
won’t find themselves expected to go from
prince-on-a-white-horse to sole provider forever!)
We can play games with make-believe money,
and use that opportunity to introduce the
concept of where money comes from. Children today have an even greater challenge than
we did. We might still remember putting our
hands into our little jeans pockets and pulling out wrinkled dollar bills and coins. It was
painful handing our precious money to the
nice storeowner in exchange for some candy
… and watching our money disappear into his
big cash register.
But today, it’s all too easy for kids to think
money appears miraculously (and effortlessly)
out of the wall. All you have to do is walk up
to that wall, slide a piece of stiff plastic into
a slot, push a few buttons and—voilà! —out
comes money. The relationship between money and someone’s effort to earn that money is
more tenuous than ever. Even worse, we now
call money “funds,” and send them around the
world at the click of a mouse.
At the appropriate age, kids can be taught that,
while the total amount of money in the world
is virtually limitless, the amount available
to them (or to the family) at that moment is
limited and has to be allocated based on needs
and priorities. How that is done is up to each
parent’s beliefs, but the important thing is that
it be done.
We cannot function effectively in the world
without a healthy relationship with money. So
don’t ask your kids to live without such a rela-