By Andrée-Anne Guénette
Should we wait until our children are older to talk to them about money? Not at all. Even toddlers, our children can tame the basic concepts of personal finance.
Isabel, a mother of two children aged 8 and 10, believes that too many parents skimp on their children’s financial education by forgetting to tell them about the value of things. “Everyone has to raise their children as they see fit, but my children have plenty of friends whose parents buy anything from them. Clothes, toys, trinkets from the dollar store, not caring whether they need them or are going to take care of them. And that saddens me. I have always talked about the value of things to my children, and I buy what they need, nothing more. Now that my daughter is older, I give her a budget, and she chooses her clothes. This is a great opportunity to calculate and think about her needs and what she can afford. »
How to do it?
Talking about money to our young children is not always easy for parents, who often worry about the best way to go about it. Should we give our children an allowance? Tell them our salary and the cost of our living expenses? Give them money to cover certain costs? A September 2017 survey of Canadian parents found that money was the fourth most crucial topic to discuss with their children, after politeness, how to deal with strangers, and bullying. Still, 31% of respondents said they had trouble broaching the subject.
It may be that money is an increasingly abstract concept in our lives. “We pay by credit or debit card; we hardly handle cash anymore,” explains Isabelle Jolicoeur, financial security advisor partner of Sun Life Financial. This is why it is interesting for children to have a piggy bank in which they deposit money. It is a step towards financial autonomy to have to manage small sums of their own. »
