Today we're talking about one of those most practical of all topics – money, and particularly how you teach your young people about it. This was easier with the older kids because with the older kids, I mean, you get a job, start a business, make a budget, save money, easy. You can't tell your five year old to go get a job.

So how do you teach these young kids to manage money? How do you teach them to take it seriously?

We do need to take it seriously because of the things we noticed when we were researching our book on marriage. The Holmes-Rahe Stress Test, something psychologists developed years ago, ranked major life events in their order of impact on your health. The death of a spouse is number 1. Number 14 was “financial issues,” but everything above number 14 had a financial impact of some sort. It touches every aspect of our lives and you know, it's something that we need to be intentional about teaching, starting from very early, to be stewards of what God's given them.

So what does that look like?

Part of it is just teaching them what money is and what it's about. For example, we teach our kids that money is like a voucher for work. That's a concept which we don't think everybody has really thought through. We're in the business of writing and publishing books, but we can't take box loads of books down to city hall to pay our electrical bill. They're not going to be impressed because they don't need books. You need money because money is a voucher - we get a check for the month for the work we do and we take it to the bank and when we use that money to pay other people to their work,

That's an important principle to get to the children to see that every piece of money that passes through your hands, somebody worked and did something productive. Either they did some labor or they produced something for sale, and that that piece of money represents certain amount of their work, time, and effort.

It's really super important for young kids to grasp because you know when you connect it, when you can say, okay, well dad had to work for this money. What he did earned the money that we're spending. That makes it real and helps the child understand that spending is not just, “Oh, Daddy has this wonderful magic card and we just hand it to the merchant and they give us hamburgers.” … (listen to the whole thing below!)

 

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