A guest post from Jason Piccinin, a father in Sydney Australia
A common situation to any parent of a young child; it’s 1am and you have managed to get a half decent night sleep until you hear a scream for a midnight feed. As you hastily move to the other room (in the hope to quench their thirst without having to spend the next 30 minutes nursing them back to sleep), you manage to step on what can only be described as the hardest & pointiest rubber object with your foot. The problem is I know exactly what it is, who’se it is and how valuable these things are to my 6, 9 & 10yo — Ooshies…if you are not across this craze there is a good chance you are not the parent to a primary school aged child.
What these little rubber figurines represent to children is a number of things: value, persistence, willingness to take chances, and negotiation opportunities. These are not traits taught in a classroom, though are skills we as adults call upon on a daily basis. So my question is: why do I allow my children to spend $3/packet to teach them these qualities?
Obviously this is an isolated situation. Children do not merely learn fiscal responsibilities by collecting pencil toppers, basketball cards, marbles or whichever fad was applicable to your generation. Aside from the sheer game of luck played each time a sealed packet is purchased, there is a deep seeded DESIRE due to a perceived market VALUE society places on an object we WANT.
Teaching in my family
These traits are visible when we are preparing to buy our first car to buying an investment property. Yet I truly believe these life skills are not sufficiently taught by parents & teachers alike, though I can not establish if it is purely a matter of each party thinking the other is teaching the child — and the child is the one that misses out.
I am a big subscriber to showing appreciation, as this acknowledges one’s surroundings and an understanding for what is happening in front of you; this is where the value chain begins. Without going into the detail of interest rates & offset accounts with my eldest, I instead opted to give him an understanding of what it takes to run a household. The electricity that powers the lights & charges his tablet, to the gas that heats up the water in the shower — all this has a cost attributed to it. I have noticed him begin to acknowledge this by seeing a light on in an empty room and saying ‘this is costing money to leave on’. This leads to the inevitable ‘so where do you get the money for that’’ question.
A child’s mind is an amazing thing, especially when it comes to simple arithmetic — when mummy/daddy put their card into the machine, money comes out…simple! This is where the concept of how to obtain wealth comes into play. Making my children understand the concept of a job is paramount. It is imperative that a child understands that money trees don’t exist and that nothing is free — no sugar coating! One method we have used is to incentivise weekend sports. During soccer, the kids are rewarded for scoring a goal or setting one up for a teammate. This I believe only works if the child WANTS to participate in extracurricular activities, otherwise the wrong message is being sent.
Teaching the value of saving
The concept of saving is an interesting one with children. As a firm believer in serviceable debt — this is not the model to begin teaching my 6yo. Rather, simply breaking this down to understanding their wants and using this as learning opportunities has worked for us. My daughter wanted a particular toy and knew she needed to save up her birthday money to purchase it. Funnily enough her birthday came around and that toy was not the desired item anymore — a further learning opportunity.
The concept of money & bartering has not changed since its inception, though we do need to stop relying on traditional methods of teaching (math lessons & textbooks) and demonstrate through the use of more entrepreneurial & troubleshooting methods of obtaining wealth — find a problem and/or need and solve it.
Gone are the days of a single bread winner leaving the family home, enabling the partner to take care of chores. With both parents now working extended hours, this presents new challenges to both parents & children alike to think of concepts that could ease the day to day grind and present a problem-solving exercise the whole family can get involved in.
One concept is the idea of gamification, which traditionally applies to the online world of apps & game play; so why not to financial reward? Have children save for something without actually knowing they are saving, rather by obtaining badges for completing learning modules and challenges in the real world. Through the example of weekend soccer, if a goal is scored or set up, the child earns money. They understand to get more time on the field, they need to work hard at training. By getting on the field, this improves their chance of scoring or assisting their teammates.
Now this is all well and good, but there is always the ethical balance in a household; how does one balance what should be financially incentivised versus what forms part of the mantra ‘you’re in this family, so you pull your weight’…each situation is different and it is up to us as parents to navigate this gauntlet. No child deserves $5 for making their bed, but a 12yo may be willing to cut the grass for $20 on those weekends the parents just could not be bothered!
Learning outcomes measured
In preparing to write this piece, my son approached me the other day and said ‘I swapped 2 rare & 2 common Ooshies for 4 rare ones”. Without wanting to show my age, I hid my confusion and asked some pointed questions. To my surprise a fair bit of forethought went into the transaction. I asked him if he thought about the dollar value of the toys to which I got a no, “I just know that these are harder to get then the ones I swapped and the other boy was willing to swap”; striking while the market hot! They did have an agreement that if one wanted to swap back that they would — this can only end in tears but lessons need to be learnt, as I can’t see the ASX willing to refund me on that poor performing stock.
We all want the same things for our children; health, independence and happiness. Unfortunately without a sound fiscal understanding of how the world works, this can risk one, if not all these things. For now, having to nurse my foot due to their lack of value in their belongings is causing me slight discomfort but is always another great ‘learning opportunity’.
Thanks for reading and we hope you enjoyed Jason’s story. We first met Jason when his family signed up for Pennybox beta. You can learn more here.
