Financial awareness is not born with us, it needs to be learned. There are those who learn easily, those who learn hard, based on what we experienced from our parents at home, and how open we are to changes.
The importance of parents in raising a child to financial awareness was a topic in an earlier blog post already, so now, let’s take a look what’s worth paying attention to according to age brackets, if we want to raise children to financial awareness.
- At 3-6 years old: the process of purchase can be introduced to the child through toys in a store. In this age, the best way to show children how the ATM works is through toys. They can learn how money can be used for many different things, and that it’s not endlessly at hand, which means one needs to handle it sparingly. Exploiting the nursery age passion for collecting has its merits, talking about how money can also be collected, and used sparingly.
- Between 6 and 10 years, children should ideally take part in shopping. It might be useful if two parents think out aloud, explain the reasons for choosing to make a purchase. For example, the reason for choosing one product over the other is that they are both tasty, but the one chosen costs less. We can make the shopping more exciting for them through various different tasks, for example asking them to select fruits for 500 HUF (~1,5 EUR).