Parenting money advice: not worth much?

Use jars to divide up your kids' money into... Seriously, don't bother. 

There’s a mini-industry out there offering parenting advice to people who want their kids to be good with money. Nothing wrong with that, except I have a feeling it’s not necessarily going to be effective.

Obviously you want your kids to be good with money. You teach them what you can. You try to role model good money behaviours. All perfectly sensible. But the idea that there’s a system of jars or a foolproof pocket money strategy that will ensure your child is a smart spender? I’m not buying it. My parents raised three kids using the exact same system of pocket money and financial education and we have totally different spending and saving personalities. Let’s just say that we range between “spending money feels physically painful” to “I don’t look at my bank accounts at all because I know I’m not going to like what I see”.

Yesterday I was chatting to another finance writer who admitted she’d been awful with money when she was younger and her sister is still even worse. She says her parents were themselves excellent with money and tried hard to instil these values in their daughters, with no luck at all. It was, and remains, enormously frustrating for the mum and dad.

“I was writing recently about talking to your teenagers about Kiwisaver and I thought, if my parents had tried to talk to me about Kiwisaver you can guarantee I would not have listened,” she told me.

I have a strong feeling that no system of pocket money or lecturing about the sharemarket is going to change a child’s predisposition to spend or save. The best we can probably do is to make the people around us think about the future rather than focusing on the present. It’s boring work, but that’s parenting for you.