Many of us may have experienced the kid insisting to get alluring stuff being shown on TV in various ads. The kid may be scrolling through e-commerce websites and finding some attractive clothes, toys or, articles of makeup falsely claiming miraculous results. Are they worth buying? Are their usefulness had proven. In several examples, they end up being useless.
Despite having felt their worthlessness, most parents yield to the pressure of their kids only just to make them happy. The big business houses understand this basic instinct and exploit the parent by pushing ads that might allure children and the parent find no way but to buy those stuff for their kids. Thus making a big profit by leveraging their product to target children and adolescents.
This is why we need to inculcate financial literacy in the children from the beginning so that they may develop a skill to judge the utility versus the price of the products, they need. They should have value for money and understand the importance of frugality and savings.
However, on the contrary, we fulfill all the demands of our kids, whether without thinking that whether it is necessary or not. Consequently, children do not develop a sense of financial planning, budget, marketing, saving, which are key for a satisfactory lifestyle these days.
Here are some tips to start financial literacy in children from the beginning:-
Motivate children for saving
Though at first instance, it may sound silly yet it is the perfect way to teach the children to understand the importance of money. In fact, it is the first step towards financial literacy development from the beginning. Children may be pursued to make saving out of pocket money given to them by parents time to time. Let them be convinced that the saved money shall not be accounted for grant of subsequent pocket money, instead, the parents would be happy to know that whatever amount is given to the children is not wasted. In fact, it is utilized prudently.
In the rural area of India, such habit was cultivated in the children traditionally by giving them small money boxes made of clay and designed in the style that there was only a hole in the box to drop coins. Whenever the money box gets full, it was broken to collect the coins. This money was used to purchase valuable items for children. It was really an amazing way to develop the habit of saving in the children. Since the advancement in technology has changed the older way of saving and replacing it in the digital form, now a day a saving account may be opened for them and pocket money may be credited to their account so that they may keep a track of expenses. It is well an established fact, that cash money in hand tends to be spent very quickly. So encouraging children to make payments digitally would eliminate any possibility of reckless expenditure.
Discuss the home budget with kids
The object of discussing the home budget with the children is only to instill awareness into them of how prudently expenses are managed to fulfill all requirements or even to gather surplus money for some kind of extravaganza. It is not meant to give them a sense of financial weakness if any instead to make them learn to adopt prudent preferences when it comes to making some purchases. Sometimes they may be given the task to suggest ways to filter out some money from the home budget to buy a new thing such as a smartphone, gaming console for them. This is not meant to turn children into a person who catches money with their teeth. On the contrary, they would be encouraged to make optimum use of whatever money they have.
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