My oldest child is in the middle of learning 2 fundamental concepts in life:
Telling Time
How to make change from $1
Most adults take this sort of thing for granted but for kids it can be a challenge. Time is anything but standardized when it comes to units. 60 seconds in a minute. 60 minutes in an hour. 60 hours in a day, right?
Money is not much easier due to modern payment tools. Electronic payments like Venmo, Apple Pay and just plain old Credit/Debit cards remove the tactile experience of counting change from a cashier or scrounging together enough coins from between the car seats to pay a toll on the turnpike.
Despite the quirks, kids catch on eventually to the calculations but it takes maturity and practice for kids to understand the value behind the time and money they count.
Children’s Idea of Time
Kids and time generally do not mix. Young people have the most time of anyone, yet most of them want everything immediately.
Countdowns are hell. Countdown to dessert. Countdown to Christmas morning, Countdown to bedtime. Everything is about waiting for the thing you want (or Dredd)
Time feels different for a kid too. For an adult, 1 year can fly by. For a kid, a year can feel like an eternity. After all, 1 year represents a whole 10% of a 10 year old’s existence but a mere 2% for a 50 year old. We have inflation levels bigger than that! (What? Too soon?)
With this in mind, more so than the act of telling time, kids need to learn time Management skills:
setting and keeping a schedule
designating time for certain activities
No dillydallying getting ready for school (First time I ever wrote that word)
Planning for the future and not just living for the present
It’s the time management where the value is and where Dads need to make sure they teach the right lessons.
Children’s Idea of Money
A kid’s idea of money is even worse than time. Kids know money as a tally of points whose source is shrouded in mystery. An arbitrary number of points allows you to have this or that with little understanding of where the points comes from or how they accrue.
Allowance for chores or birthday money from Grandma & Grandpa are really just arbitrary windfalls or a crude exchange for services at best. They’re anything but lessons of personal finance or how to put an accurate value on work / service / products.
Getting more money from a job, business or investment is not something you generally learn on the streets either. It take deliberate learning of both hard an soft skills then applying those skills to achieve success.
With this in mind, it’s Dad’s job to help the kids have that accurate sense of value beyond just counting coins or receiving that $1 for completing a chore around the house.
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Thoughts? Questions? Comments?
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