Teaching Tots About Money
Is the sippy cup stage too early to start teaching kids about money? Absolutely not. That's the message of a recent MSN.com article, which offered several helpful ideas for teaching pre-schoolers about money. The article suggested teaching little ones that there are three things you can do with money: spend, save, and give. To make the concepts more real, give them some money (the article's author started giving her daughter an allowance when she was three-and-a-half), and then teach them to give a portion of all they receive to charity and save a portion. Spending provides opportunities to learn about making trade-offs.
Matt's View
A couple of good sources for ideas on teaching tots about money are the Credit Union National Association and the National Endowment for Financial Education (click on "Simple Steps to Raising a Money-Smart Child").
One of my favorite ideas for teaching kids about giving is to sponsor a child through Compassion International . Showing our three-year-old a picture of the child we sponsor (a boy named Aziz who lives in Burkina Faso), writing letters to him, and reading aloud the ones we get back make the impact of our giving more real. Now when I ask our little guy what we can do with money, he often says, "Spend it, save it, or give it to Aziz." Well, it's a start.
This article filed in: Kids
Managing Money by The Book
- "Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock." - Matthew 7:24-25
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