on Nov 29th, 2009Teach your children well
You want your children to do the best they can in every way, and you want to give them every advantage you can give them, right? You feed them well, dress them well, teach them everything about the world you know to teach them. You are stunned by how much love you feel for them, and now you understand why parents always say they would step in front of a speeding bus to save their child. You would, too, and of course you are teaching them how not to step into traffic, how not to step into the course of that bus when it’s barreling down the street. You want your children to know how to stay safe.
Money, however, is also a safety issue in your children’s lives. Just as you, and I, and all of us need money to keep us safe, so will your children need to know all the steps to financial freedom.
Remember how, in the beginning of this book, you went back to your own childhood and began to reconstruct your money memories, to show you how they led to your fears about money today? So, too, are your children becoming imprinted with money memories right now, and it is your responsibility as a parent—or aunt, uncle, godparent, or friend of a child—to give careful thought about how you transmit messages about money to the children in your life.
Over the past few years a small industry has arisen with books, games, and computer programs to teach children about money, which I think is great. If you have a child, buy as many as you can and pull the best ideas and information from them. The advice won’t all be the same—that’s okay; again, you will follow your inner voice about what and how you want your kids to learn. The best thing about these books and products is that they open up the dialogue about money, a subject that has been treated as a secret for so long. But they’re only good as far as they go, because money messages are transmitted as much through the heart as through words you learn in a book. If your kids hear you swear at your stack of bills, if they sense fear, if they’re constantly told what you can’t afford, that’s what they’ll learn, even if you go by the books to try to teach them healthier messages.
Today’s children will inherit a global economy, a high- tech world, an increasingly competitive universe in which they’ll have to make their way. Yet so many parents I see, when I ask them how they teach their children, talk about piggy banks and passbook savings accounts and allowances and how they plan to start saving for their children’s college education one of these days. A piggy bank will not exactly teach your children about life in the twenty-first century. It is just another financial symbol relaying the message that to retrieve what you have saved, something has to break. We relay this message many times over to our children, especially when it comes to college funding. In order to send our kids to school, the bank truly has to be broken wide open. You know it, and your kids can feel it, too.