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Never Say These 4 Words to Your Kids If You Want Them to Be Good With Money
Problems managing your money, experts say, often run deep. If you can’t stop spending, run up debt, or struggle to invest in yourself or your business, often the issue isn’t lack of knowledge. It’s your emotions and deeply held beliefs around money. That’s why truly getting your finances under control often looks less like math and more like therapy.
So where do the money hangups that cause many of us such stress and difficulty come from? Sorry to lay another responsibility on you parents, but the answer generally is our early experiences learning about money.
Research by psychologist Brad Klontz, for example, shows that growing up poor can lead to feelings of defeatism (“No matter what I do, I’ll never have any money.”) Having a rich relative who always swoops in and saves the day, on the other hand, may unconsciously teach kids that everything always works out. As an adult, they might take reckless risks.
All of which boils down to a simple if scary truth: How you behave around and explain your finances really matters for whether your kids grow up to be good with money.
And according to financial guru and author Ramit Sethi, parents often make a crucial mistake when talking about money. Never tell your child “we can’t afford it,” he warns.
