Want to know the easy way to teach effectiveness to your child? Click here!
One essential attribute everyone should possess is knowing how to survive with minimum resources- not just from a monetary perspective, but even in terms of the diminishing natural resources that we are constantly exploiting.
The values that are ingrained in us as children become our habits and a part of our lifestyle. More importantly, we as children internalise our parents morals and ethics. This concept of social learning was first explained by Albert Bandura.
So if you want to teach your child that money is hard earned and needs to be valued, you’re reading the right article. We are going to use barter to give you tips to teach your child money management. By using barter you will yourself be engaging in behaviours that promote efficient money usage and this will put into play the social learning theory.
Teaching children to get rid of their hoarding habit, and promoting a ‘re-use’ mentality is a sure way to nurture them into being nifty young adults. Some of the techniques you could apply are:
Set an annual spring cleaning rule. This will make your child sift through every piece of clothing and other junk in their room once a year. The purpose is to make your child aware of all his possessions and identify what they really use or require, and what can be done away with. For every few items they give away, they should be allowed to get one in return because barter helps incentivize children towards a good habit. You can use the Let’s Barter India app to get rid of the old belongings and allow your child to choose what they want in exchange.
Hoarding is a common habit in today’s consumerist environment. Help your child refrain from this unhealthy lifestyle by promoting simplicity,which is what gets one happiness ultimately. The second technique we at Let’s Barter have discerned is to tell your little one to give away a belonging for every new possession they purchase. So if your son buys a new PlayStation game, he should donate an old game he owns. The Let’s Barter India app is perfect for such a system, as it allows you to conveniently get rid of the old and buy a new commodity on the same platform.
Lastly, a concept closely related to token economy should work well with children. Token Economy is a form of behaviour modification designed to increase desirable behaviour and decrease undesirable behaviour with the use of tokens. The tokens are collected by children and later exchanged for a meaningful object or privilege.
Next time, rather than punishing your child, try grounding them till they have earned enough points (by doing chores) to be ungrounded (you can set the limit according to the severity of punishment). So for instance, your child lies about the marks he got on a test, instead of taking away his television watching rights, make a list of house chores such as room cleaning, dish washing, cooking a meal etc with points allotted to each task. Use the Let’s Barter app to help them buy something useful from a plethora of options.
Reuse and Refresh, our tagline cannot be better addressed and emphasised upon. They both are vital for minimising spending and wastage, and for maximising usage. And we can only hope we’ve made our point on the necessity for training your children to be wiser consumers by being effective money managers.
