Rule 2: Make sure your role modeling is intentional and visible
Then the focus must shift to learning to save. So, you have the resources, but you are not going to rush out and give them all away.
Ask yourself: when was the last time your children saw you earning or saving?
The answer is likely never, as gone are the days when cash is brought home on pay day and stowed away in a piggy bank. Earning occurs purely digitally nowadays. Saving, too, is no longer visible to our children: it’s completely abstract, and yet, it is a core skill we need to teach our children, as it is going to be the most critical for their long-term success.
We often see toddlers throwing tantrums in supermarkets and it’s a microcosm of the issue we face today. They see their parents selectively taking things off a shelf and placing them into their trolley. The toddler wants to do the same, and when they are told not to, their frustration takes over because the exercise of making a list, discussing needs, wants, and prices has become completely invisible to them. If it’s invisible, a young child cannot learn it. They can only make sense out of what they see, which has little to do with planning and everything to do with execution.
The only visible part is the fast-finance part: a tap or a swipe, and you leave with your device in your hand. You haven’t given anything away, so money is not seen as a transaction: in the eyes of a young child, money is simply an action. The same way an item purchased online appears on a doorstep when it gets delivered – in a child’s eyes, we just “get” things, so the association of money with consumption is many times more visible than the effort put into acquiring the resources that we are consuming.