Читать книгу Launching Financial Grownups - Bobbi Rebell - Страница 13

As the grownup, you are ultimate stakeholder in your kids' success behind only the child themselves. In the Introduction, I shared the story that inspired the book: trying to get my kids to open up a Roth IRA before the deadline, only to be met with indifference and apathy. We often assume that kids are motivated and interested in having more money. But in many cases, especially if they have not had to worry about money, there is little incentive to take action. All their bills are paid. In fact, the bills are often never even seen. They take money for granted because they don't have skin in the game and have not been asked to contribute. The money is just there for them.

I've done dozens of interviews for this book precisely because even though I am a CFP^® professional, I've struggled so much with this issue. My own kids have shown little to no interest in money at times. They have always had what they needed, and until recently my husband and I have kept them largely in the dark about our specific financial concerns. We wanted to protect them. We wanted to protect our privacy. We wanted them to feel secure. We never wanted them to know when we felt financially insecure. And frankly, sometimes we paid because we wanted those things more than they did.

A successful money manager who was a guest on my podcast confessed that he bought his kids cars as soon as they were old enough to drive even though they had not earned them. Frankly, he wasn't confident they would even take great care of them. He and his wife simply didn't want to be driving the kids around anymore. He absolutely thought the kids should have earned the money to pay for at least part of the cars, and he wanted them to pay for things like gas and insurance. At the end of the day, though, he didn't have a way to really enforce that because the kids knew the dad wanted them to have the transportation.

He's not alone. Many of us have used our financial resources to push our kids to do things that we believe will benefit them or to serve our own sense of what they “should” be doing. I know we are not the first parents to take a giant gulp and enroll our kids in lessons they want no part of.

I'm still not all that thankful my parents made me take piano lessons. They insisted, I resisted, and I still think it was a waste of money. My mom clearly felt that piano lessons were worth whatever they cost at the time.

Still, I find myself repeating the same parental behavior. If I had asked my son to earn the money to pay for his drum lessons so he would appreciate them more because he had skin in the game, guess what would have happened? He would have said no thank you and dropped the drums. It simply isn't something he values at this age.