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person’s relationship with money affects so much: values, choices, outcomes. It can define a life. And yet we seem to believe that money is such an adult business that its workings must be all but hidden from our children. We so want to protect them – not just from danger, but from the messy worries and anxieties of being a grown-up – that we don’t talk to them about the thing that causes some of the biggest anxieties.
This might seem like kindness, an attempt to preserve carefree innocence, but really it is just storing up problems for the future. And anyway, children are observant little sponges, so what they don’t learn about money through open and frank conversation, they will learn by watching us, picking up on our approaches and responses, making them their own.
Fine, you might think, I am careful with money, so my children will be too. Take your conversations elsewhere! But this process of behavioural osmosis can have unexpected outcomes. You might imagine that a thrifty person would produce a thrifty child, or indeed a financially reckless person would beget a splurger. But the combination of influence and individual is not so simple. I see this in my own family. My husband’s thrift has become the stuff of legend. He is proud that he has not purchased a new item of clothing in three years, he darns the holes in his ten-year-old socks and cannot pass a skip without rifling through it, triumphant as he brings home yet another broken chair. And although my teenage daughter has done her fair share of skip-diving with Dad, she announced the other day that what she really wanted when she got older was a job that paid loads of money, so she could buy expensive trainers and cars, because, she explained, that was what would make her properly happy.