Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Learning to prosper, or go broke
Next time you pull out that plastic for an impulse buy, you might want to think about who’s watching. If the kids are nearby, your lax attitude about money could actually be harmful to their futures.
Why? According to a Chicago Tribune story, parents are the most important influence on attitudes about, and behaviors with, money. The Trib cites a Charles Schwab Foundation study that says 56 percent of teens are worried about their parents’ finances. Even so, 87 percent of those surveyed also said they rely mostly on their parents for information about money.
The story kicks off with a now-money manager who’s father bought him 100 shares of a mutual fund for his 13th birthday. Not a very heartfelt gift, you say? Well, the manager credits his father for simply inviting a young boy into his financial life and showing him that investing was important.
I don’t know about you, but I grew up in a family where money was rarely discussed. But I did learn something about managing money from having a large paper route. My mother struck a deal with me right from the start — half of everything I earned had to go into a savings account. And often she took me with her to the bank to make the deposits. By the end of high school, I had enough money to buy my own computer (in the mid-1980s, I was the rare freshman with my own computer, an Apple II-C!).
Even so, I knew little about big picture money issues. Days before I went off to college, my father sat me down and showed me some calculating he’d done. He’d figured out how much of his money I would waste every time I missed a class. The big figures he threw out in front of me had little impact. It was only at school when I looked around at friends who were working two jobs or living at home to pay for school that I began to appreciate how fortunate I was to be student loan free.
Now with my own children creeping up into elementary school, it’s a struggle to figure what to teach them about money and when. After reading the Trib’s story, I feel good that I usually model good money behavior. I tell them frequently about their college savings funds, sometimes showing them the statements and talking about how much they have, what they’ll need and emphasizing that I expect they will go to college. I think that’s at least a decent start.
Even so, I goofed last week when my first-grade daughter asked for money to use at her school’s book fair. When I offered her $5, she looked disappointed. Did I have another $1, she asked? She wanted to buy a poster for $5 and a popular wacky pencil for $1. All I had was a $10, so I told her I wanted my $4 change. But I forgot to ask for the change later.
Two days later she came home with her book fair score — two posters, the goofy pencil, a bunch of other trinkets and one lone book. My wife was outraged. Where did she get the money? Well, I admitted, I gave her $10. Waaay too much, she told me. She should only get $5 at the most and then only with the agreement that she spend the money just on books. But we knew the posters alone were $5 each. So where did the rest of the money come from?
Seven-year-old Claire owned up that after spending my $10 she tapped her piggy bank the next day for all the bills she had. She didn’t even know how much she had spent! Needless to say, a sit down ensued.
I’d love to hear your stories. How did you teach your own children about money? Or did you parents make and right or wrong moves with you that we can learn from?
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