Teaching our kids to save.
I don’t know about you but in these times of financial crisis I can’t help but to think that our educational system did not teach us enough about the economy. Of course, growing up we learned about logic, math, reasoning, etc. However, the emphasis was never placed on things that directly affect our everyday life.
Questions like: What is credit? How do loans work? How much savings should we have? In fact, why should we save? are never addressed in school. The unfortunate thing is that our entire life is based on those.
Think about it. The house you (will) buy, your kids education and so many other things in life are all linked to your understanding of these basic questions. Still our kids are not taught any of it in school and a big majority of adult Americans do not really understand them.
Granted, my kids are very still very young (the oldest is 5) but I decided it is never too early to start teaching. So I started with savings. The concept is simple: “put aside part of what you ‘earn’ and use it later to buy something that you really want”.
Personalized Ceramic Piggy Bank
Simple concept indeed…but for a young child things need to be fun. Picking one item she wanted was relatively easy and fun (we still had to eliminate ten’s of other choices that were on her which list). Where it became a little bit more difficult was to keep her engaged day after day.
Very quickly she lost interest. The final gift was replaced by other things in her mind and the money did not catch her interest (duh…what was I expecting).
After talking with my husband we came up with a plan. Make it personal. The idea was to find something that would motivate her and would remind her of her goal. After some research we found a site that sold personalized piggy banks.
That was perfect. She loves animals, we can personalize the piggy bank with her name (which she loves to spell and write everywhere) and “saving” became feeding the piggy.
So far it has been working pretty well. When she receives ‘pocket money’ she happily runs to her pig and feeds him. In fact she became quite attached to the animal. She plays with it and talks with him.
It worked so well that Sophie (our 3 year old daughter) told us she “wanted to start to save”.
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great article.thanks.
thank u,very great
Thank you for sharing
Thank you for your sharing