Parents, These 5 Habits Are Teaching Your Kids To Be Bad With Money

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There’s so much that any good parent wants to teach their children. They want to impart good values to raise good people who are able to stand independently in the world. If they’ve done their jobs right, their kids will grow up to be compassionate, hard-working, and focused on building positive futures for themselves and their own loved ones.

But if this education in resilience doesn’t include information about how to handle money successfully, parents aren’t setting their kids up for secure financial futures. You don’t need a finance degree to do it — something as simple as talking to your kids about money or walking them through some of your own financial decisions can make a major difference. 

However, if you continue on with certain poor habits,  your kids could enter adulthood with no common sense about their dollars and cents. 

1. Never Talking About Money 

Perhaps your parents or grandparents treated talking about money as something gauche or taboo, and you’re inclined to follow suit. How did that serve you as an adult? Think of the money mistakes you’ve made that you simply didn’t have to, like failing to have an emergency fund, let alone putting it in a high-yield savings account. Do you want that for your kids? Of course you don’t.

Simply talking to your kids about money can make them aware of the key terms and ideas they should be learning about as they get older. It also lets them know that it’s okay to come to you with questions about money, instead of making damaging mistakes. 

2. Not Having Your Own Budget  

When BuzzFeed asked readers to share the unhealthy personal finance habits they’d observed in their own parents, one of the most common responses was that they never saw their own parents actually sit down and create a budget to manage household expenses. One reader shared how her mother’s poor financial management and love of finer things left her with only her Social Security income in retirement. 

But this lack of budgeting also occurs at the micro-level: Another reader described how their parents took them to carnivals, but with no budget for food, leaving them and their siblings to walk the fairgrounds hungry. 

3. Mismanaging Your Own Credit 

You might think your own credit card woes go undetected by your kiddos, but you’d be wrong. More often than you’d want to admit, they notice how you use — or misuse — your credit cards. One BuzzFeed reader said that watching her own mother go on spending binges led to her own overspending and credit card debt in adulthood. Another recalled her mother having store credit with pretty much every store they frequented — a habit that created a sense of financial disorganization and chaos. 

4. Giving Away Money for Nothing 

You may tell your kids that “money doesn’t grow on trees,” but if you’re handing them cash for no reason, you’re planting the seeds of poor money management. Yes, special occasions, school trips and necessities that an after-school job can’t reasonably cover are exceptions. But random handouts can be damaging.

According to MoneyTime, a resource designed to teach children about money management, giving your children money without requiring effort or responsibility can impact their resilience later in life: “Money is earned by working hard and being smart. It’s one of life’s immutable laws and the sooner they get that ingrained in their heads, the better for their future and your cash flow.”

5. Micromanaging Your Kids’ Money 

Naturally, you want your kids to enter adulthood with smart accounts set up, some stocks humming along and a healthy savings cushion. But if you’re essentially micromanaging every aspect of their finances — including tracking their paychecks — you’re limiting their ability to learn how to do it for themselves, even if that means making a few mistakes along the way.

The experts at MoneyTime suggest that being a helicopter parent for your kids’ finances can be damaging to their long-term ability to learn and grow: “Let them make their own choices. Allow the bad decisions to hurt a little and the good decisions to feel good. Giving them the freedom to experience the ups and downs of financial choices helps them understand the value of money and the importance of making smart decisions.”

Sources: 

• BuzzFeed, “13 People Opened Up About The Unhealthy Money Habits They Learned From Their Parents And How They’re Working To Change Them”
• MoneyTime, “10 Mistakes To Avoid When Teaching Your Child About Money“

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