Beyond Origins the Discussion

Develop Good Money Habits In Kids

May 28th, 2008

When you train kids to think positively about their money goals from an early age, you give them the best possible start in life. If you want to give kids a great money mindset, the ideas in this blog post could be a place to start. We don’t get taught how to give kids a great money mindset in the normal course of events, so those who want to give kids a great money mindset have to go out of our way to find help and resources, and to trade information.

It is so important to give kids a great money mindset. the mainstream media pours a relentless torrent of negative and demotivational messages at kids, and kids are easily sucked in to spending hours sitting like blobs and consuming those messages. Watching television actually changes the brain activity, making it more difficult to get up and turn the thing off. It has an almost hypnotic effect. Only by working doubly hard to get the right stuff in during the early years can we give our kids any resistance against the new “opiate of the masses”.

The education system, too, is not set up to give kids a great money mindset. If anything, it is the opposite.

The education system creates in kids an absolute conviction that the major thing to focus on is the avoiding of making mistakes. Robert Kiyosaki outlines how this happens in his first book, “If You Want To Be Rich And Happy, Don’t Go To School”.

Of course, to learn anything requires trying and failing and learning from the mistakes. Trying to avoid making mistakes leads many kids to hold back from trying, in case they fail.

Successful people are willing to “give things a go”, even if they don’t have all the answers before they start. They accept that mistakes are the price of progress, and they simply adjust their course according to the feedback provided by their mistakes.

Entrepreneurs, in particular, are willing to fail. As Winston Churchill said, “Success is the ability to go from one failure to the next with no loss of enthusiasm”.

The education system even stunts the ones who don’t actually fail, because they are still imbued with the crippling fear that they might fail at some point, and suffer the awful fate that befalls those who do.

A system constructed this way is just not able to give kids a great money mindset. Our kids depend on the caring adults around them to pass on the vital attitudes and life skills that will prepare them to succeed.

If you are teaching kids business skills, the education system won’t give you much support. Fortunately, with the internet, there are more and more resources available for people who want to give kids a great money mindset.

Entry Filed under: Kids & Teens