Opportunity is everywhere, but we need to learn to see it where it matters most.

In the first part of this series, I made the statement: The reality is that whether you have any interest in wanting to teach your kids about money or not, if you have kids, you ARE teaching them something about money.

So, the question is not will teach your kids about money, it’s will you put some intention into how you teach them about money? In the next 3 posts of this series, we’ll talk about specific ways to think about structuring different types of lessons, but the goal of this post is to get you to start to pay attention to and recognize the countless opportunities to teach kids about money that you are likely encountering daily, and particularly to get you acquainted with the ones you may be overlooking or even subconsciously avoiding. At this point, the goal of this exercise is NOT to take any of these ideas and directly teach or translate them into lessons for your kids, it’s for you to become aware of how and when YOU learned about money, so that as we dive into how to teach kids about money in the next 3 posts, you’ll understand the importance each type of lesson plays in your kids overall formation of a money identity. To start this exercise, look back at the list you created in the first exercise of the first blog post on this topic. What do YOU feel, think, and believe about money? For each item you wrote down… take a step back in time. Trace those feelings, thoughts, and beliefs back to the memories that come up when you think about them.

    a. What are the earliest memories that are attached to them?
    b. Are there a lot of memories attached to each one, or maybe just a single impactful event, lesson, or conversation?

The important part of this exercise is to really dig deep and think about how and why these observations, experiences, and conversations led to your deeply held beliefs about money, whether they were meant to or not. Some of these emerge with clear and direct lines to a specific lesson or piece of advice someone gave you. You’ll find that others may have been built up over years of watching, observing, and interpreting the behaviors of the people who were raising you or the people you were growing up alongside. And others may be directly tied to certain experiences you had with money, like your first job,  first major purchase that you regretted or felt great about, or a time that you loaned a friend money, and it changed the dynamic of your friendship. Let’s walk through how this process works, step by step with a few different examples:

Example 1:

Let’s say you have on your list a statement like “you should always save at least 10% of your income for retirement.”

You may be able to clearly trace this back to a single conversation (or a series of conversations) with an individual like a parent, or colleague at work.

In this case, there’s a relatively direct line between an impactful conversation or lesson, and a belief about money: you believe you should always save 10% of your income for retirement because, on your first day of work at Boeing, John from engineering told you to put 10% of your income into your 401(k), and that’s served you really well.

Some things we think and believe about money are literally that clear cut. But others, you’ll find, are not at all tied to explicit lessons or conversations you’ve had with people about money.

Example 2:

You might also have an underlying belief like: “I find it satisfying to be financially compensated for doing a good job at something,” and it may be that this belief brings up a few experiential memories:

  • Mowing the neighbors’ lawns when you were a kid, and feeling the satisfaction of both earning money, but also doing a job someone appreciated that contributed to a sense of neighborhood and community
  • Getting your first real promotion or bonus at work
  • Landing a big new client for your business, and having that client be really satisfied with the product or service you provided them

Some feelings we have about money are very experiential in their creation. We know them not because someone told us about them, but through experiences we’ve had that have created and reinforced them.

And certain things we believe about money, the ones that are often the most pervasive but also the hardest to recognize, might be even more complicated to unpack from a memory perspective.

Example 3:

Maybe you are also carrying around a core belief that it’s never okay to spend money on things that bring YOU joy or happiness, which might be a lot more complex to unpack. This could come from many different sources, like

  • Memories of not being able to have things you wanted as a child because there wasn’t enough money
  • Parents who lost their homes or maybe couldn’t retire because they hadn’t saved enough
  • Parents or other caregivers arguing about money when one person spent money on something the other considered frivolous
  • Adults passing judgement on others (or possibly even on you) when they spent money on something that wasn’t strictly necessary

Where complex, core beliefs are concerned, I encourage people to relate them back to as many memories as they can think of, but also, pay specific attention to the first time you remember thinking or feeling this way, and the memories that bring up the most intensity of emotion.

We all have these pervasive feelings about money (and they are often the hardest to recognize because they are there ALL the time, but they don’t necessarily tap dance out in front of us and say, “look at me!”). So, if your first list doesn’t contain some big core underlying ideas that are a little bit complex to unpack, try to pay attention to those subtler feelings you get around money by exploring these questions:

  • How does spending money make you feel?
  • How does an unexpected large expense make you feel?
  • How does earning money make you feel?
  • How does payday make you feel?
  • How does talking about money make you feel?

If you’re really having trouble spotting these, pay attention to when you might be tempted to say something like, “Doesn’t everyone feel this way about money?” That’s a key indicator of a belief that you hold so deeply that you’ve never questioned that other people might feel or believe differently than you do. You’re almost holding it as if it’s a fact, rather than a belief.

An example of this might be someone who has only ever lived paycheck to paycheck, who believes that, except for people much wealthier than themselves, every payday comes with an immense amount of relief, and that the end of a pay cycle often comes with a lot of stress about money. This isn’t true, but it’s so much a part of their money schema that they’ve never stopped to see it as a belief rather than a fact.

I’ve tried to give a lot of different examples, but it’s possible that none of the above statements apply to your money beliefs at all, which is fine. The point of the examples wasn’t to unpack your beliefs for you, it’s simply to show you how to pay a bit more attention to where your beliefs came from, and to provide some guidance if you are not sure where to look. Because if you don’t remember how you learned about money, it can be easy to overlook so many of the ways your kids are learning about money.

Let Go of Logic and Trust the Process

As you go through this process, you might realize that some of your memories don’t make sense in hindsight – our childhood logic often seems silly as we reflect on these things as adults, and yet many of the underlying feelings it created are persistent. Our adult logic doesn’t make them go away.

So, an important note here, especially about the third type of example, is that it doesn’t matter if your belief is rational or what you consider, in hindsight, to be an appropriate and accurate takeaway from the situation.

For example, you may believe money is the root of all interpersonal relationship problems, because growing up your parents fought about money all the time and eventually got divorced. And the adult version of you may clearly understand there was probably more to it than that, but it doesn’t really matter. Whether your takeaway was accurate or not is irrelevant, and in fact, it’s super helpful to notice where your core beliefs were formed by inaccurate or incomplete interpretations of situations, because it will help you to realize that your kids may be sitting there watching you or other people, and formulating stories of their own, that may or may not accurately reflect the truth of the situation.

Pyramid of Money Learning

Whether you do the exercise or not (I mean, I hope you do, but even if you do not) it will start to become apparent for most people that there’s sort of a pyramid of money learning that we all go through.

And this is why it’s always been so hard to answer this question when parents ask “what” or “how” to teach kids about money (and why this is a series, not just one blog post). Because it always seems like what they want or what they’re thinking of is more along the lines of something in the direct/discrete information realm. Something at the top of the pyramid. And those top of the pyramid lessons and conversations are the last place we want to start when it comes to teaching kids about money.

Because the uncomfortable truth of it is, for most people who say, “I just wish someone had told me… [insert favorite piece of financial advice here] sooner,” it’s likely that somebody did. But if somebody told you something, and you didn’t have a strong base to attach it to – an overall curiosity about money, a sense of how to evaluate the advice someone was giving you, and an overall foundation to ATTACH that discrete information to, there’s no reason you would have held onto it. So the first time you remember learning it was likely not the first time you were exposed to it, it’s just the first time you had a reason to listen, and a place to attach it to and store it.

We need to start at the bottom of the pyramid. The first question every parent should be trying to answer is, how do we start building those core beliefs about money that we want our kids to have? And if you already have older kids, how do you effectively intervene to help them change some of the core beliefs they may have already started to develop unintentionally?

Why Start with Core Beliefs?

For now, I’ll finish this post by relating a quick anecdote about teaching high school math, one that I think drives home the critical nature of what I want people to understand after reading this post. As you may know, we have a math learning epidemic in this country of epic proportions, and it starts for most kids when they’re very young. It’s a problem that gets created the minute a single core belief gets interrupted. The essential core belief required to learn math is, Math makes sense. A kid who believes math makes sense and holds that as the groundwork for everything they learn about math, is likely to be a successful learner of math, even with a mediocre teacher, because that kid will question, and/or disregard anything a mediocre teacher says that conflicts with this core belief. On the other hand, even the best teacher won’t be able to teach math to a kid who doesn’t believe it makes sense. That’s it. You can layer the best math lessons in the world on top of a base of “math doesn’t make any sense” and you’ll never get anywhere, which is why most kids simply give up on learning math at a young age. Many mask this for a long time because they are reasonably good at learning a discrete set of skills for a short amount of time, but those skills have nothing to stick to because they long ago gave up on the idea that math made sense. And I won’t even get started on how that core belief gets interrupted at such a young age, but by the time kids get to high school, it’s very hard to undo years of repeated reinforcement of the idea that “math doesn’t make any sense,” especially if it’s coupled with another core belief like “you’ll never need this.”

Get Ready to Start with those Core Beliefs About Money

(Next Time we Meet!)

There are a lot of things kids can do in this world that will allow them to get by without math, but there’s very little in the adult world that will be as forgiving to them when it comes to getting by without the ability to responsibly navigate money. So, we cannot sleep on these core money beliefs and how they get created in kids, and we absolutely should not pretend that telling them to put 10% of their income into retirement when they get their first job, or a quick personal finance lesson on how to create a budget is going to counteract years of imprinting core money beliefs on kids. This is where we must start.

Image attribution: Photo by Kris Len Lu on Unsplash, Photo by Kristyna Squared.one on Unsplash, Photo by Rishi on Unsplash