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.