Search Results for: What is

A lot of times, I find myself struggling with the urge to buy that new trendy phone (which I don’t need anyway).

Or eating out at lunch rather than bringing one in from home.

Or buying my kids a toy when they’ve been especially good.

Sound familiar?

Early last week I attended a personal finance seminar that left me thinking. Would I want my kids to manage their finances like I do? How am I doing in keeping up with my saving goals? Am I going to have enough for those big things I need? How about retirement? And what am I teaching my kids about spending versus saving money?

In our daily lives, we are bombarded by multiple messages urging us to spend. From TV commercials to web banner ads, the message is the same: BUY ME!

With consumerism being normalized as a vital part of our daily lives, the time is ripe to teach our kids the value of money as early as their preschool years.

There are many reasons why starting early is important. One, kids absorb knowledge faster at this age. They then form habits that they take with them into their adulthood.

Alfred Adler, in his groundbreaking individual psychology theory, remarks that a child’s attitude towards the problems of life is governed by their childhood experiences. In fact, a Cambridge University study shows that adult money habits are set by age seven.

Secondly, we do not want our children to be part of the negative credit card statistics. In a personal finance survey for college students by Lend EDU, 59% of students surveyed graded themselves below average in successfully managing their finances. 41% of the 455 surveyed saved less than 10% of their monthly income.

Teaching kids the value of money helps with the setting of specific savings goals during their adult life. Without specific goals, saved money can easily be withdrawn for impulse buying and overspending.

Finally, you never know what is going to happen. Recessions happen. Employers go out of  business. Cars need repairs. The roof needs replacing.

There are literally a thousand different emergencies that can happen and all of them require money. If you don’t have that rainy day fund saved your credit cards are going to take a hit and then you’re going to have to dig yourself out of the hole.

It is therefore important to teach our kids the value of money. These 4 tips will get you started on the beautiful journey to teaching consumer smarts.

[Read more…]

“Daaaaaaad!!!!! Get it!!!! NOW!!!!”

My 3 year old points to the street, where my husband had just set out the trash, at the bags of aqua green flitting in the wind.

She can’t stand it. The sight of anything BLOWING. It fills her with anxiety and dread. You can see it on her face. My husband has to run out to the curb and retrieve the bags he just moments before hefted toward the street.

When he comes back in through the door, her little body relaxes and she goes about her business. I look at my husband and give a whisper of thanks.

I, too, was just there last week. Running like an idiot through the parking lot of Walmart to chase a flyaway bag because I thought she was going to have a heart attack.

Or the time I heard screaming coming from the bathroom. “MAKE IT STOPPPP!”

I thought something terrible had happened.

I raced into the bathroom to nothing spectacular, much to my relief. Just the towels on the towel bar blossoming slightly upward from the force of furnace air emanating from the register.

Then it all came back to me. The garbage bags. The parking lot. The wind. All of these factors equaled one thing and one thing only: they made my girl ANXIOUS.

[Read more…]

There is nothing like hearing your child yell the dreaded F-word for the first time.

It’s especially nerve-racking when it’s in front of the entire extended family. Including the grandparents.

At a family dinner, my eleven-year-old nephew was deliberately jostled by his younger brother, resulting in his half laden plate tilting. With hot curry spilling over his hand, he yelled the F-word as loudly as he could.

Amidst the cacophony of family banter and the clattering of cutlery, you would have thought the word would have gone unnoticed but nope! There was complete silence around the dining table as if someone had pushed the pause button. Several pairs of eyes (including mine) zeroed in on the culprit.

Like a well-rehearsed play, the scene played out.

The youngsters looked down and snickered. Some of the adults (including me) tried to ignore what we had just heard. But not the grandparents!

[Read more…]

Grit

Determination

Tenacity

They are all words for Resilience.

Resilience is more than the buzzword of the year. It is what gives us “the courage to go after our dreams, despite the very real risk that we’ll fail in some way or other.”

Isn’t that what we want for our kids? To go after their dreams and their passions and achieve them? Ever since I read Carol Dweck’s now-famous book Mindset : The New Psychology of Success I have been looking for ways to teach my kids this kind of resilience.

We go on hikes and do brain-teaser puzzles. We have even tried a ropes course in our quest to build resilience within them. It was in the midst of walking my oldest son through an algebra problem that I realized that resilience isn’t just a mindset, it’s a habit.

Resilience should be as much a habit as brushing your teeth in the morning or having a snack after school.

It’s something that we should be building into our everyday lives in such a way it becomes an unconscious choice. We simply don’t consider giving up when we don’t get that math problem right the first time. Trying again is our habit.

My boys are good at showing resilience in big moments or for specific projects. For example, my oldest son wanted to experiment with parallel circuits for a science project. He had all kinds of issues with the connections between the wires. The tape would slip or the wires wouldn’t be making good contact with the battery or he attached the wire incorrectly.

There were definitely moments of extreme frustration. He lost his temper several times and had to walk away from his project a few times. But he always came back and tried it all again.

In his everyday life he doesn’t seem to have that kind of resilience as his default. We recently got new kittens. I asked him to open the can of food for them and that’s when the trouble hit. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to open a can of cat food, but that flip-top lid can be difficult to open. When he was unable to get the can open he just gave up!

He didn’t even ask for help! He just stopped trying completely and left the can on the counter for me to find. The resilience to keep trying at the lid was not a part of his default setting.

So how do we make it a real habit? How can we teach them everyday resilience?

[Read more…]

In my doll’s tea set, there were no cups without saucers.

If the mudguard on my bike was crooked or rattled, I’d insist that my Dad repair it before I could ride my bike again. (We jokingly called it ‘Rattly Mudguard Syndrome’ (RMS) in our house when things weren’t quite how they should be.)

My floral duvet could be nothing other than symmetrically placed on my bed each night. I had cleverly mastered the art of measuring it by becoming a snow angel centered in my bed to see where the duvet fell across my legs. Only then could I sleep.

Well, it took me a long time to drift off as I mentally prepared and played out everything I had to remember for the next day. Forgetting was not an option.

As a child, it was a standing joke in our house that I liked things a certain way.

At school, I refused to complete an entire page of sums, but instead would go to the teacher and ask they mark each one. I had to know that I’d got it right before I continued.

As I got older, exams would send me into meltdown as I didn’t have the luxury of time to perfect my work.

Every mistake felt like a kick in the guts. Every mistake was a reminder of how wrong I was as a person. I would exhaust myself avoiding that shameful heavy feeling which repeatedly reminded me that I wasn’t good enough.

[Read more…]