Cash Richdad

If there’s a topic that parents dread talking about with their kids more than sex, it’s probably money. Not so long ago, the question: ‘’How much money do you make, Mom?'’ might have elicited the brusque reply: ‘’None of your business.'’ Today things are changing. In a culture inundated with gossip about celebrity incomes, stock-market chatter, and TV shows such as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, family experts–and parents–believe tackling these types of queries head-on is the best policy. Even if you don’t disclose your actual earnings, you can parlay your answer into either a discussion of economic and social values, or a lesson in money management.
 

Educating kids about money is a tall order. Parents must transform an abstraction into something concrete, and then put it in its proper place in the family’s life. With so much of our identities wrapped up in how much we make, money can be a highly emotional issue. As for money skills, parents get little help from schools, which usually don’t offer instruction until high school. And schools don’t pay enough attention to financial education as Robert kiyosaki also quotes.  '’If parents don’t take the time to answer their kids’ questions about money, the school of hard knocks will,'’ says Dara Duguay, executive director of the Jumpstart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy
 

So welcome the questions as a chance to teach. It helps to remember that your child’s age and your own comfort level will steer you to the answers
 

Don’t wait for questions to begin fiscal education. Even with a toddler, it’s not too early to dispel the notion that ATMs generate money. Each time you withdraw funds, explain that the money comes from Mommy and Daddy working, and that the bank is merely storing it for the family.
 

The time to really open your balance sheet is when your child is making choices about college, says Elissa Queen, a children’s therapist in Woodmere, N.Y. You can then dispel any mistaken assumptions your kids may have made about the family’s resources. And you can work as a team to pick a school that best suits your child’s academic needs and the family’s financial ones. And the teen years are usually when youngsters make their first foray into the working world. Many experts say a job is essential in teaching kids the value of money, as long as it doesn’t distract from the teens’ real job–school.
 

No matter what the ages of the children, parents need to be frank when finances take a turn for the worse. Children learn more by watching what their parents do than by listening to what they say. So the more consistent parents are in their own financial behavior, the better examples they’ll be. If you’re not clear yourself about what money means in your life, you’ll never give the children satisfactory answers to those thorny money questions.We should try and give the financial education to children as early as possible. And this will help them all along in anything they choose to do. They should know how money works and the importance of money.

“Academic qualifications are important and so is financial education. They’re both important and schools are forgetting one of them.” Robert Kiyosaki