PARENTING : Teaching children about money

Ismail Amina is a network marketer whose job is not your regular 8am to 5pm. Her work gigs are therefore not consistent, so to supplement her income, she started baking cakes and other confectioneries.

As she bakes, her four-year-old daughter observes, and sometimes lends a hand. The duo has done this for two years during which a business partnership is slowly but surely taking shape.

“My daughter knows I’m a network marketer, I work to get money and when she assists me during the baking and cooking, I pay her for her efforts,” Amina explains.

Save their earnings

Amina bought for her daughter a piggy bank where she keeps a coin or two each day. This is her reward mostly for helping do crockery her mother uses during baking.

“She loves it. That is how I have introduced her to finances. When I bake for commercial, she knows I always get money from it and nothing is for free,” she adds.

Counsellor Sophia Gombya applauds parents who bond with children from their first day as a premise upon which trust is built and therefore an initial step to verbal and physical communication.

Involve them

This ideally plays into other mutual engagements. For example, when a parent has to introduce their child to money, Dr Sabrina Kitaka, roots for children’s input in drawing shopping lists, as a way to introduce finance because the young ones get to know that requirements come at a price.

Ignatius Mulyowa, of Cheerful Life Counsellors, adds that when parents take children for shopping and not all items they want are not bought, they get to appreciate the need for saving money.

The earlier the better

He commends parents such as Amina who have introduced a piggy bank at a tender age.

“The earlier the better. If you introduce children to finances at an early stage, it is a culture that they are most likely going to grow up with. Encourage them to save and teach them its importance,” Mulyowa adds.

Draw a family vision chart

Ronnie Ntambi, a communications consultant, reminisces his toddler years. “We always had a list of demands. Sometimes basic, on other days very hilarious. One day, we introduced the family annual vision, where we would sit and cut images from magazines showing stuff we wanted to achieve that year,” he explains.

He adds, “If one wanted a family holiday, we would find a picture of a family on holiday and if it was a car, we would cut a car from the magazines, and pin on our family vision chart. Once the vision was established we would talk about financing it. This is when we opened a family saving box where we all kept the loose change.”

This got them to appreciate the idea of saving before they went out to shop or spend. Little by little each one of the family members accumulated money. When they opened the saving tin six months later, it had nearly Shs1.3m. “It was a celebration. Now each one of my children has a saving box and a bank account,” Ntambi adds.

Reward efforts

To encourage her daughter, Amina uses some of her profit to buy small goodies such as toys, a pair of shoes or takes her out for ice cream, which is a good bonding moment, away from work and business for the two.

“But whenever we bake, I get some coins or a note of Shs2,000 and I testify before everyone in the house saying the money is for the work that she did. And she puts it in the piggy bank,” Amina shares.

Using the savings

So whenever the little one wants a sweet, her mother will talk to her about her savings in the piggy bank. “When her cousins come to visit and they want something, she always gets the piggy bank and brags that she has money, then they go alongside an adult to the nearby shop to buy what they want.”

Kitaka says be it finance to create bonds, parents need to be in their children’s lives as much as they can because they are impressionable and it is important that they take up habits from people who are worth emulating.

How we do it

• For Sam Nikoma, managing director, Allied Media Services, when the family goes shopping we make a list together. We do not buy what is off the list. “I tell them that is not within our budget and tell them that we can buy it some other time when we have the money,” he explains.