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It strikes me that parents today are trying to show their love for their children by giving them stuff and trying to make everything easy for them. It sounds good on the surface, but it doesn’t build learning experiences, character and discipline. It just builds their sense of entitlement and sets them up to fail. I constantly see parents in competition with each other in terms of how much stuff their children have as a barometer of “success”.
It’s better to spend time with your children colouring with crayons or taking a walk in the woods. My mother wouldn’t buy stuff for us but if we wanted to learn something, she’d bend over backwards to find the money.
I surveyed adults over Xmas. Best toy ever? Then I happened to mention that the best toy for me was a freezer box that my mother passed to us kids in the basement. We played in that thing for hours. “Oh, yeah,” everyone exclaimed, “Yes, the freezer box was a great toy!” Seems like everyone had had an opportunity to play in a large box at one time.
Sometimes the kids play in the box that the toy came in. Go figure.
I believe that as soon as kids are old enough to understand, they should be explained the whole story of the family operation. Parents work. They spend hours and hours working and for this they get paid (= money). The money pays for the house and the food and the car. If the parents have a calm house, they work better and that means a nice house, food, a car and clothing.
Simple.
Dr. Phil talked to some 9- to 11-year olds about money on a past show here. I hardly ever watch this show but this segment is worth watching.
It was an eye-opener for the kids how much money went into the household budget. The jaw-dropping part for most of them was how many groceries the price of an iPod would buy. One father commented after the show that the children knew to the penny how much an iPod or laptop or game cost but couldn’t tell you how much their parents paid for their car or mortgage.
Talk to your kids about money.
If you’re lucky your children will grow up to be rich and never have to worry about money. And if you’re really lucky they’ll support you in your old age.
For the rest of us it’s worth passing on some sense of how to handle money to our kids. I remember when I was young it was thought that you should work hard and learn the value of a dollar. I did. Recently I found out that the dollar is now worth about 35 cents.
We’re faced with a situation where the value of our currency is going down and incomes for the most part are a bit stagnant. For this reason we need to be even more clever with the money we earn. And this should be passed on to our kids.
We always had paper routes or some such part time job when we were kids. Our allowance was 25 cents a week, or not at all. Our mother was a single mom with 4 kids so not always a lot of extra money to go around. We earned our own spending money.
Every dollar your kids earn as their own spending money is one extra dollar you can use to pay down a bill, or save for a better car, or whatever is needed to maintain a decent standard of living.
Teach your kids to earn their own spending money, and to handle it well, and everyone wins.
-Phil
I was at Value Village the other day and it was a costume haven. As Halloween approaches, another costume that might work for you is Ace Venture, Pet Detective. Just a cheap piece of tulle from your local fabric store, white shirt, black boots, some hair gel and voila! – you have a costume.
Another inexpensive Frugal-Bugle costume here. Another bunch here.
Before you throw out those single socks and pantyhose with the runs in them, consider this easy costume - STATIC CLING !
From Burda, you can easily make a Halloween costume from items around the house.
When my son was little, instead of Coke or other sodas, I mixed club soda with juice. He got a fizzy drink and thought he was drinking a soft drink. Club soda in my grocery store is about a dollar for two liters. Made a lot of drinks.
I found a site online:
http://www.sodaclub.com/
You can make your own carbonated water. The Fountain Jet and Edition 1 start at $80. The machine carbonates 60-130 liters of water. You save money but there is also less packaging, less transport for bottles and you can carbonate your own filtered water.
You can mix most juices with club soda and kids like the fizz. Even a spoonful of frozen concentrated juice can be added directly to carbonated water.
A soda pop substitute.
I’m sure you’ve clicked on those “Save $2000 a year right now!” links and found out it involved packing and taking a lunch with you to work. Blech, you say. Who wants to eat a dry ham sandwich with an apple? You took them dutifully through grade school and you’re through with that.
I invite you to visit Lunch in a Box:
http://lunchinabox.net/
She is a Bento Box genius. Packed lunches will never be the same.
I touched on this a year ago when I wrote about her amazing jello jigglers here.
Cruise through her website and you’ll want to take a lunch to work.
Now you can “Save $2000 a year” and look forward to it.
While my son was growing up, I spent over $10,000 on his dental needs. That did include braces but it was still a lot of money. I used the University of Toronto’s dental clinic where I was able to use the talents of less expensive interning dentists but I still spent a fair bit.
According to Dr. Steven J. Brazis DDS, you can raise your children with up to 90% fewer cavities than the national average. Read his book, “Your Children’s Teeth: A Parent’s Guide To Dental Health” to find out how.
I was reading through some of my posts on things you can do with your children. Rather than make you wade through the last year, I’ve summed up some of the best ideas here.
Teach your kid how to catch an invisible ball in a paper bag. My son made that video at Christmas and it never fails to wow young kids (and even some adults) when they see that trick in person.
You can make hacky-sacks and play with them.
Make some gelatin jigglers. Even if you don’t make them, check out the bento box website for lunch ideas on that link.
Make paper airplanes, learn to tie some knots, skip stones or bake something.
Star gaze, make paper mache and get more ideas in the Dangerous Book for Boys.
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