My son's piggy bank has $9.20 in nickels, dimes, quarters and loonies. I know - we just counted it together. The piggy bank is a squat ceramic box with the Tower of London on one side and, on the opposite side, a Beefeater, or Yeoman Warder, the ceremonial guardians of that Tower. It was his father's as a child, given as a baptism gift in England and now perched on a shelf in our son's room here in Canada. It fits snuggly in my palm, heavy and cold. When I replace it on the shelf, I notice that it is covered in hairline fractures, a spider's web crisscrossing the sides.
Lasse is a newly minted five year old, full of questions and ideas and plans. As he tries to figure out what our world is about and what makes it go 'round, his questions sometimes veer towards money and all things associated with money: what it is, where it comes from, why we need it, what we (or he) can buy with it. He loves to take the shiny coins out of his piggy bank, look at them and turn them over in his palms, and then drop them back in with their telltale clink-clunk. His questions about money are abundant and varied: how is paper money different from coins? Why aren't coins to be played with like other toys? Where does the bank keep our money? Is five dollars a lot of money? Does having tomato plants in the back garden mean that we won't have to buy tomatoes at the market this summer? Can we buy a new toy?
Now that he can read, the questions are becoming more specific, more nuanced: why do we get so many flyers in the mail saying "sale"? What does "3$ off" mean? Why do companies try to sell us things through advertisements? Bigger questions, too, often come after reading stories or after a day at school: Why can money make people happy or sad? Why do some families have more money than others? What does it mean to be poor or rich? Are we poor or rich? Does it matter?
Lasse can identify Canadian coins and add them together, so long as the sum isn’t too large, but he can't make change or really understand what something costs. He knows that we keep our money in the bank, but the process itself is confusing to him. He knows that we are saving for his university, but -- as a kindergartener -- has almost no conception of those ideas. He knows that it takes money to buy things, and he knows that we earn our money from work and from investments, but, again, the processes are far from clear to him. As far as I can tell, he thinks of money as very similar to our fruit bowl: as it gets used up, we re-fill it, again and again, a continual cycle. But the intricacies of that cycle are not clear to him: Will the fruit bowl always get re-filled? What if the fruit bowl is empty? When and how does it get re-filled?
At five, Lasse is still young. He is very much a child, at his happiest when playing in the splash pad with his friends, twirling in circles, digging in the sand, putting together Legos, and reading books. But, simultaneously, he is old enough to understand that money is something particularly special in our society; that money has a power of its own; and even to grasp the idea that money will be critical for his future. As his parents, it is our responsibility to answer his questions to the best of our abilities, to nurture in him an understanding of money and of the financial world, and of the associated responsibilities. After all, we only have 12 more years until he will set off on his own -- and by the time he graduates from high school, I want him to have a solid understanding of how to manage money, how to budget, what things cost and what he can afford, of the myriad of financial products out there, of the stock market and investments, of the emotional side of money and finances, and of how to plan and organize his life to make the most of the money he will earn. And that, in a nutshell, is what this blog is about: a conversation about children, money, finances and all things in between.