Twice a week I make a trip to the neighborhood departmental store to buy the week’s groceries and I make sure both the kids tag along. That’s perhaps the only time they see money transactions happening in front of them and of late, I’ve begun trying to use it as a starting point for talks about how cash needs to be used carefully, saved carefully.
Both Timothy and Sarah love playing the ‘imaginary restaurant’ game at home. Tea time is usually game time at home, when the daughter seats herself at our dining table and the son does the waiter’s job, doling out cookies and a glass of milk. Sarah actually pays her bill at the end of the ‘meal’ using fake Monopoly cash, and takes back change from Timothy; both the cashier and the customer get super excited about the money handling part!
We have Monopoly and The Game of Life at home, and so I was pretty fascinated when I came across this article online which talked about how board games can be used to help kids understand money in a better way. If you can accumulate properties and emerge as the richest player at the end of the game, you’re the winner at Monopoly. It can be helpful to give kids a basic idea about what an investment means, how to spend money on a property, how taxes and other expenses crop up. On the other hand, The Game of Life is quite literally the game of our lives – one encounters expenses which everyone experiences as they go through their lives such as going to college to get an education, getting married, employment and even retired life.
John Lynch, director of the Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making at the University of Colorado, put it this way: “Let’s say you want to teach your child about budgeting, and you know that every year, Aunt Ethel writes your child a $50 check for Christmas. The moment to talk about budgeting is just before that happens. If you have that conversation a few months before or a few months after, it’s not going to have an effect.”
According to me, it’s always a good idea to begin early. When your kids are young, you can make it a fun activity – for instance, playing board games which involve cash, or letting your kids handle real money such as paying the parking meter fee – and they could end up learning quite a bit about finances even without realizing it.
We even have a traditional pink piggy bank at the topmost shelf of the kids’ playroom which rattles with coins saved over all these years! :)
Both Timothy and Sarah love playing the ‘imaginary restaurant’ game at home. Tea time is usually game time at home, when the daughter seats herself at our dining table and the son does the waiter’s job, doling out cookies and a glass of milk. Sarah actually pays her bill at the end of the ‘meal’ using fake Monopoly cash, and takes back change from Timothy; both the cashier and the customer get super excited about the money handling part!
We have Monopoly and The Game of Life at home, and so I was pretty fascinated when I came across this article online which talked about how board games can be used to help kids understand money in a better way. If you can accumulate properties and emerge as the richest player at the end of the game, you’re the winner at Monopoly. It can be helpful to give kids a basic idea about what an investment means, how to spend money on a property, how taxes and other expenses crop up. On the other hand, The Game of Life is quite literally the game of our lives – one encounters expenses which everyone experiences as they go through their lives such as going to college to get an education, getting married, employment and even retired life.
John Lynch, director of the Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making at the University of Colorado, put it this way: “Let’s say you want to teach your child about budgeting, and you know that every year, Aunt Ethel writes your child a $50 check for Christmas. The moment to talk about budgeting is just before that happens. If you have that conversation a few months before or a few months after, it’s not going to have an effect.”
According to me, it’s always a good idea to begin early. When your kids are young, you can make it a fun activity – for instance, playing board games which involve cash, or letting your kids handle real money such as paying the parking meter fee – and they could end up learning quite a bit about finances even without realizing it.
We even have a traditional pink piggy bank at the topmost shelf of the kids’ playroom which rattles with coins saved over all these years! :)