Excerpted from Beyond the Piggy Bank, a 15-Day Challenge One of the goals for this Challenge is to develop healthy attitudes about money in our children. Since YOU have the greatest impact on what your kids learn about money, it’s important to take a little time to reflect honestly on the money messages you are sending them. Ask yourself the following questions. To help clarify your thoughts, you may want to write your responses down on paper. ~What is my…
Long story short, kids who know how to delay gratification tend to grow up to be adults with higher paying jobs, have happier relationships, are physically healthy, and are persistent in their pursuits. Let me know if you want the details to this longitudinal research. Using money, we have an unbelievable way to help our kids learn to delay gratification. It’s all about setting personal financial goals. There are three types of goals kids can set: ~to purchase a specific…
I asked my son, Ryan, to write about his experiences earning some additional money by selling things on ebay. Here is what he wrote, unedited by his mother! ~ Ebay can be a great tool to making money, anyone can do it, too. Kids, adults, it doesn’t matter! I’m Ryan, 15 years old, and I have used ebay since I was 12 to make money, mainly because I was too young to get a job. Ebay is extremely easy to…
We impart our values to our kids through our words and our actions. Mostly our actions. Take a moment to reflect on the things you value. Integrity, compassion, honesty, persistence, courage, patience… Now think about an action that can be associated with each one. For example, returning the unpaid can of tuna you discovered in the shopping cart ~ honesty. Or volunteering to speak at the board meeting even though the thought of speaking in front of people makes you…
We all know that literacy, the ability to read and write, is an important life skill. It’s so important that we often create an environment at home to reflect this. We start reading to our kids from an early age, years before they know how to read themselves. We surround our kids with all kinds of reading materials from books, to magazines, to newspapers, to grocery lists. And then, to underscore the importance of reading even more, we read in…