Financial Lessons You Need to Teach Your Children
Helping children save is an important part of parenting. Helping them make good financial choices are critical in the early part of child rearing. Here is how to go about it:
Children need constant attention and care in order to grow up to be respectable citizens. They also need an awareness of what money is an early age to be reasonably equipped to eventually grow into respectable citizens. Thus, teaching children about the importance of money is a critical part of their personality development. It will encourage a tendency to save and thus promote good financial health from an early age. Here are the important financial lessons you need to teach your children:
Telling Them To Make Use of Time
If you manage to drive home the relationship between savings, compound interest and time, your child is very much in a safe place as far as financial lessons are concerned. It is paramount to make a child understand that the most valuable thing in the world and what he/she has in abundance at this point in time. A child’s understanding of interest rates might not be as comprehensive as yours but, at the same time, they can definitely grasp the idea of saving a little now and having access to more in the future. Telling your children about why their time is so important can be very meaningful to their lives.
Using Money for Fads
The archetype most teenagers want to fall in line with is of the cool kid who mostly has everything a kid his age should want. To an extend, it is alright to want things that have been warranted as desirable by peer groups, but it is always important to make your child understand that blindly following trends can be counterproductive for his finances. This awareness is also important for his/her personality development. To raise a self sufficient and opinionated child who can contextualise the popular trends doing the rounds in popular culture, he/she would need to check themselves from spending money on passing fads.
Setting Goals and Focusing
Short term goals can be useful in the long term. Making sure your children cultivate the patience and focus to meeting their short term financial goals is good parenting. This will provide them with incentive to imagine bigger goals and harder financial targets. As a parent, providing your child support and the means to save money whenever they can through the use of short term goals will be very helpful for them. Failure can also be a lesson here. Teaching your children the consequences failure will have can have a far reaching impact on their personality. But, of course, the onus should be on letting your children be better equipped to avoid failure than encouraging them to be afraid of it.
Encourage a Little Skepticism
The common criticism thrown at skeptics is that, they lack imagination. This can be true, seeing through everything around them would not be good for growing children. The problem is, the world itself has fast transformed into a space that is always trying to sell you something or the other. Information has become a marketing tool for companies to manipulate you into buying into their narratives. Helping your child see through these gimmicks would help him/her develop into an intelligent human being. A little skepticism would quite possibly go a long way in ensuring that your child would never end up wasting money because he/she was misguided about a product or service.
Letting Them Make Their Own Mistakes
It is possible to angle your child towards the right direction if you think they are going astray. It is even possible to explain to him/her what he is doing wrong multiple times and hope that they understand. What you cannot do, is constantly watch over their shoulders and accentuate the mistakes they might be making. The final lesson, is that as a parent you would need to finally let your child make his own mistakes and learn his own lessons without you being a key part of the narrative.
Children need your attention and values at an early age to decide who they want to be. Teaching them about money is an important part of coming of age. As a parent, this responsibility falls to you in spades. Teaching them good financial sense will inculcate responsible living and good behavioral standards.
