For details on how to participate, please check out the welcome post. If you’d like to join in but aren’t sure what to write about, try the topic suggestion for this week: Teaching the Value of Money.
How do you teach your children how to manage money and how to make decisions about spending, saving and giving?
Before I go any further, I need to tell you that when I was copying some information from last week’s post, I somehow messed up the Mister Linky and erased everybody’s links. I was able to put a few of them back, but I know I didn’t get them all. If you posted last week and your link is gone, please add it back in. Sorry!
OK, back to the topic at hand…
We are just really starting to talk about money with our son. We did introduce a weekly allowance a few months ago, primarily to stop the incessant whining for a toy or video every time we went to the store. Slowly, he has come to realize that things cost money and that there is not an infinite supply of money to buy them.
At first, he would spend his money every week on something little – we have a lot of Hot Wheels cars now – and never have enough for a DVD or other bigger toy, but eventually he began to choose to wait until he had enough to get the larger item. This interest in short-term saving really kicked in when he got interested in Webkinz. He figured out how many weeks it would take him to get a new Webkinz and would resolutely turn down other purchasing opportunities so that he could reach his goal.
Now that he is seven (today, actually!), we are going to step it up and start talking about giving and longer term saving. One of his birthday presents is actually the ABC Learning Bank, which will hopefully make the topic fun for him.
So, that’s where we’re at with the process of teaching Michael about handling money. I would be very interested in hearing from you on what has worked for you – in terms of how you introduced the different concepts, what resources you found helpful, etc.
Please join in and share the creative solutions YOU have found to your own challenges, or feel free to post your own challenge for input from others.
Topic Suggestion for Next Week: Disciplining Your Child. The person who suggested this topic specifically asked about the teenage years, so if you have experience in this stage of life, we would love to hear from you next week. If your children are younger, what is working for you at the age they are now?
As the host of Try This Tuesday, Trish shares some of the solutions she has found to make life easier and invites you to do the same. You can also find her blogging at Another Piece of the Puzzle and Autism Interrupted.
Incessant whining! I thought that was only around here
My daughter has the value of money wade off well and good. So well that she can persuade her brothers to chip in on joint ventures.
The value of money is so abstract for my boys as the little golden plastic throw away piece of trash has the same value as a Nintendo DS. Wish there was a magic solution…..still there’s always time I suppose [and compound interest!]
Cheers
My son has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and an IQ of 51. We began a chore chart with his allowance. He has 3 chores daily and 3 behavior goals. Each sticker is worth a nickel. The chart makes columns of 20 so he can see when he earns a dollar. He can also earn extras for good behaviors or extra chores.
He cannot buy just anything with his allowance and has to have a goal to save for. That goal can change, but has to be something that he has to save for.
There are things he does that impacts our water and our heat bill, we are trying to teach him that this costs money. If he turns up the heat to desert condition, he owes me $1.00. If he gets mad and leaves the water on in the sink, he owes me $1.00 for the water bill. If he destroys things he pays for that too. If he unrolls a roll of TP because he is mad, he pays 50 cents. etc. Last night he broke his “crocs” I JUST bought him at a resale shop. He had yo go cross that money off his chart right then so that he got the consequence.
So far it has worked. He has only had to pay for the heat twice! We used to struggle with that DAILY!
Great topic, since I don’t have any experience w/ teenagers maybe I’ll post our suggestions for teaching about money next week
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Today I posted about helping community teachers (church, extracurricular activities) help our kids.
Maddy – well, we still have whining but at least it’s not about buying him stuff every single day!
Sheri – thanks so much for your input. I love that he has to pay for the things that affect the family economically.
Danette – sounds good, I really appreciated your insights about sharing info regarding your children.