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We need to teach our children to be proactive consumers – to understand value for money as well as their rights.
The only way we teach our children to become proactive consumers is to bring them into our world.
Take your children grocery shopping with you and teach them how to calculate relative pricing – let them work out which brand of tinned tomatoes, or packet of toilet paper, is offering the best value. When they want to buy a toy, encourage them to shop around and compare prices.
This also teaches delayed gratification – by the time they’ve shopped around, their interest in the toy has often diminished.
How do I talk to my child about money?
While we all want financially savvy kids, we also need to be careful about how we talk to our children about money so that we don’t instil fear in them.
I realised this when my son, aged six at the time, burst into tears because he thought we were poor and would live in a car. My husband was in-between jobs and we were about to move from Johannesburg to Cape Town. It was a financially tight time and I had to cut back on luxuries, including extramurals at school. The fact that I kept wandering around saying “we can’t afford this” or “we don’t have money for that” combined with selling our home in Johannesburg had created a whole story in his head that we were poor and would not have anywhere to live.
So I sat down and explained how our family finances work. I told him that even though dad did not bring in a salary for a few months, we had a pile of money saved up and this pile of money meant we would never be poor; it also meant that mom and dad would be able to stop working one day, when we got older.
“So why don’t we have money for toys?” he wanted to know. I used some plastic tokens which represented the money we get in each month and showed him how saving works. A few tokens are used for day-to-day stuff like paying for the house, food, clothes, petrol and some nice things like treats and small gifts.
Some tokens are used to add to our pile of money for when we are older or if we don’t have a job, and finally some tokens are then used to save for family holidays, presents and Christmas (he was very interested in the size of this pile).
I explained that when I say we don’t have money for toys, I mean that this little pile for our everyday shopping has run out. I don’t want to take money from the pile that we are saving for important things.
That day I learnt a few things:
- Never tell your kids you don’t have money- rather say you don’t want to spend money on that as you are putting money away for other things.
- If you can’t afford to buy something that they want, encourage them to save up for it themselves.
- Don’t be afraid to discuss money, budgeting and saving.
- Get your own finances in order so that you can show your children that you are making provision for the future – it will make them feel safer.
This is an extract from Maya on Money – Implement your money plan, by Maya Fisher-French
