Teaching Tots About Money

Is the sippy cup stage too early to start teaching kids about money? Absolutely not. That’s the message of a recent _MSN.com_ article, which offered several helpful ideas for teaching pre-schoolers about money. The article suggested teaching little ones that there are three things you can do with money: spend, save, and give. To make the concepts more real, give them some money (the article’s author started giving her daughter an allowance when she was three-and-a-half), and then teach them to give a portion of all they receive to charity and save a portion. Spending provides opportunities to learn about making trade-offs.
h3(matt). Matt’s View
p(matt). A couple of good sources for ideas on teaching tots about money are the and the (click on “Simple Steps to Raising a Money-Smart Child”).
p(matt). One of my favorite ideas for teaching kids about giving is to sponsor a child through . Showing our three-year-old a picture of the child we sponsor (a boy named Aziz who lives in Burkina Faso), writing letters to him, and reading aloud the ones we get back make the impact of our giving more real. Now when I ask our little guy what we can do with money, he often says, “Spend it, save it, or give it to Aziz.” Well, it’s a start.