Money is one of the topics parents most consistently avoid with their children, and then wonder why their adult children struggle with it. The research is fairly clear: kids who receive explicit financial education from parents — not just observation of financial behavior, but actual conversation and instruction — develop better money habits as adults….
Few parenting questions generate more confident opinions with less research behind them than allowance. Everyone has a system, a philosophy, and a conviction that it is correct. The actual research on how allowance affects children’s financial understanding, motivation, and behavior is messier and more complex than any single system’s proponents suggest. Here is what the…
The statistics on adult financial literacy are not encouraging. A 2023 TIAA Institute survey found that only 52 percent of Americans could correctly answer basic financial literacy questions. Credit card debt, zero emergency savings, retirement accounts that barely exist — these are not abstract policy problems. They are outcomes that trace back, in many cases,…
Schools teach children almost nothing about personal finance, and what they do teach often comes too late and too theoretically. By the time a teenager gets a credit card, the habits that will govern their relationship with money are already formed — formed at home, or by default. Start With the Concept of Trade-offs Before…