How do your children define money – and what do you need to teach them?
My three-and-a-half year old daughter told me the other day that “she has enough money so you don’t have to go to work daddy.”
This was in response to the previous six months of me telling her that “daddy has to go to work to make some money for your piggy bank”. What definition of money is my daughter trying to tell me? I think she is telling me that she is happy with what she has, and she just wants time with her daddy. Not bad for a young girl like her!
When we first hear the word ‘money’, the usual response would be a fiscal view of money – i.e. it being used to pay the mortgage, grocery shop or save for retirement. Another way of defining money would be just like my daughter did – enough money means that you can spend time with the ones that you love, if time at work is taking away from this valuable time.
How much money do we really need?
When I was growing up, I was always under the assumption that my parents didn’t have enough money. The familiar saying in the house from my mom was that we were living paycheck to paycheck. But they certainly had the time to spend with us when we needed them. I guess I didn’t realize how lucky I was growing up with my dad only working Monday to Friday and home each night at 5pm for supper.
One thing I wish my parents had done more of (or at least occasionally) when my siblings and I were growing up, is to talk to us about money. I remember going to McDonald’s every payday Friday with my family and having a great time with no worries at all. It was not until my dad’s 60th birthday that I realized (and started to remember) that my dad only had coffee as the rest of us had our ‘happy meals’ (before they were called ‘happy meals’) so that a few dollars could be saved for whatever bill was due.
The more I study the meaning of money, I remember another childhood memory: my mom telling us all about our family history. Her hobby (or may I add, obsession) was finding our history for as many generations back as she could, with the contacts that she had around the world.
Prioritizing with your kids
So if I use the analogy of genealogy, I could continue a ‘tradition’ of not talking about money with my kids, but I have chosen a different path. This is not to say what my parents did was wrong (far from that), but that I find it important to talk about money with my kids even at their young ages. I won’t be adding up the costs of raising them to the nickel, but we will be discussing costs in general terms, and learning to prioritize ‘wants’ after all the ‘needs’ are taken care of – progressing in detail as they get older.
In my book, Financial Fotographs: How to Talk to Your Family about Money, I suggest ways to initiate conversations about money. The taboo mentality needs to go and be replaced with a more knowledgeable society about money, so that solutions to money problems can be sought out before the hurdles of generations past come in front of us again.
Is it time to have the money talk?
When was the last time you talked about money with your parents, children, spouse/partner or someone else important in your life? I challenge you to take the time to find a comfortable way to introduce the topic in a conversation in the next month. Maybe it’s just talking about the stock market or a mortgage decision that needs to be made. Try it out. You’ll be surprised at what you may hear…