In his article,
Training Your Children to Manage Money, Randy Alcorn shares the following story and observation:
In the days of the Klondike gold rush, two miners struck a huge deposit. Feverishly excited, they unearthed more and more gold each day. Meanwhile they neglected to store up provisions for the winter. Then came the first blizzard. Nearly frozen, one scrawled a shaky note explaining their predicament. Months later a prospecting party discovered the note, along with two frozen bodies lying on top of a huge pile of gold.
Today countless children grow up begging and grabbing and clinging onto all the things money can buy. As adults, they rarely outgrow this shallow self-centeredness, but simply graduate to more money and bigger toys. Living their lives on earth as if this were all there is, they fail to prepare for their eternal future.
He states 10 practical ways to help your children rightly understand and handle money:
- Give your children something greater than money—your time.
- Use life’s teachable moments to train your children.
- Take a field trip to a junkyard.
- Teach your children to link money with labor.
- Teach your children how to save.
- Get your children started on the lifetime adventure of giving.
- Provide your children with financial planning tools.
- Teach your children how to say “No.”
- Show your children how family finances work.
- Never underestimate the power of your example.
Read the whole article to learn more about each of the 10 points.
