Money and your kids

Money has come up a few times lately amongst some of my younger clients in the therapy room. Their thoughts and concerns and feelings around money are, well, not great:

“I swear, I don’t know the first thing about money. I don’t know how to save it. I guess I know how to spend it. But why aren’t they teaching us something about it in school? Wouldn’t that help?”

“My dad bitches that I don’t understand the meaning behind money. He’s right. Honestly, I can’t remember holding money, like, actual currency, in my hand. Ever. Money passes through debit cards. I have no concept of it at all.”

“The only sure thing I consistently hear about money is how hard it’s going to be to come by. How I’m gonna have less of it than my parents had. That life is getting more expensive.”

“Honestly, I effing hate money. I don’t want to be a slave to it. I don’t want to be chained to some desk for 40 hours a week til I’m 70 so that I can enjoy what I’m able to put away on some senior cruise. Money is bullshit. I’d rather be poor and live in a studio apartment alone.”

Our kids are not stupid. At strikingly young ages, they know they need money to get by in this world. They know they need to do the all the things in school to get the jobs to make the money. They get that. But it doesn’t sound enticing to them. And they tell me that what they see in us, the adults surrounding them, is stress, worry and concern about money, whether we have it, or whether we don’t.

And money is a bit of an abstraction to our kids and young adults. It’s not as tangible and clear as it was when we were kids. If I had $10 in my wallet when I was a teenager, I could do the math to see how far that was going to stretch. When our kid is walking around with a debit card in his or her pocket today, they have absolutely no idea what the power of that money might be, and it feels somehow bottomless to them. So they’re a little confused when we freak about 2 AM Uber eats.

“The card worked, so the money’s obviously there somewhere. What’s the problem?”

And yet we chastise them for this. Somehow, through some magical osmosis, we think they should have a firm grasp on the value of money. But think about how very esoteric the concept is for any tween, teen or young adult today. If the card works, the corresponding money must be someplace. In an account somewhere. At the bank? Like, maybe a vault?

That’s not entirely illogical. That makes sense.

It gets more confounding for our kids as they begin to work those early part-time high school jobs themselves. They’re making a little money, but unlike us, it’s not enough to afford a whole lot. Through part-time jobs in college and high school, I was able to pay for half of my college tuition. That was solid and clear and empowering.

And that would be virtually impossible for a kid today.

So the power of money, the actual purchasing power, the saving power, and the spending power, feels feeble relative to what we grew up with. And our kids are very well aware that their spending power is diminishing. And that they’re the first generation in, well, a very long time to likely be worse off financially than their parents. They hear this all the time.

It makes for a pretty stark view of the future.

And if your kid is like a lot of kids, they might be telling you it’s just not worth it. They’re putting the idea of the time value of money to work in their minds, and drawing what feels like, in the end, a reasonable conclusion. It’s just not worth it. You might not like what it says about their character or sticktuitiveness or motivation or determination, but they’re not wrong.

Then, somewhere around fourteen, fifteen or sixteen, we start to talk to our kids about their futures. They need to start thinking about colleges. They need to start thinking about majors. They need to start thinking, at ridiculously young ages, about money. They need to consider jobs that are steady and well-paying, we tell them.

“OK, so I major in finance, or accounting, engineering or economics, and I get the job that pays me some money. But I know what a house around here costs and I know what a beginner in that field would make. I’ll never be able to do what you’ve done. I’ll never be able to afford the lifestyle I’m currently living. So why bother?”

This question is on the minds of more kids than you might know, and it drives a lot of their behavior, as well as the lack thereof. I’ve worked with countless young people who have given up on the idea of financial success, financial freedom, a carefree financial future. Instead, many of them effectively tap out. I hear over and over again, “It’s just not gonna happen for me. I’ll probably drive DoorDash and Uber and live in a one room apartment for the rest of my life.”

This is real, and it’s epidemic among young people today.

The ideas we are selling our kids about money, and the pressure we are putting on them about money, robs from them a lot of the idealism and dreams for their futures. And I can tell you with authority that this stuff shows up in the symptoms of anxiety and depression and hopelessness.

Concerns about money aren’t static. They affect most every area of a young person’s life, and the schematic of their life planning.

“I’m probably not going to be able to afford much no matter what I do.”

“I’m definitely not going to like my job.”

“I’m probably not gonna be able to maintain a relationship financially.”

“I certainly won’t have the funds to raise children. That’s supposed to cost millions.”

“Everyone saying I’m not gonna be able to afford a house. So, I should probably play it really, really safe. Stay at home as long as I can. Pay as little rent as I can. Just bide my time until it’s over.”

This is the thinking of our kids. What we tell them and teach them about money shrinks down their worlds, and narrows the scope of hope for their otherwise very bright futures. It’s imperative that we help them shift the way they think about money. A big component of that mandate is attending to how we talk about money.

Here’s the truth, a little parenting guide, and it’s not what we’re currently telling our kids. They actually will be able to afford a living, but it’s going to look different than ours did. A Time article from about five years ago indicated that my generation would work one to two jobs over the course of our careers. From the people I know, that has pretty much proven to be true.

It’s certainly proven true for me, accountant to psychologist. Two stops.

But for your kids’ generation, things actually open up quite a bit in terms of possibilities out there in the workforce. Whereas we were likely to have a singular career, often with the same company throughout, they are likely to have four to five different careers over the course of their lives. They will probably work for several different employers, one of them possibly themselves.

And one really fun part of this study that we are not sharing with our kids is that one or two of those careers may not yet exist. Yes, they may be within the AI realm or some other high-tech thing we are not able to fully wrap our brains around just yet. But that truth is pretty cool, and many of the kids I work with find the possibilities of those unknowns exciting.

And many of the twenty- and thirty-somethings I know also have more flexibility in their work lives than we ever had, working from home several days a week and availing themselves of flexible work hours.

I’m also working with more kids choosing the trades quite deliberately, knowing there will always be a need for their skill set and they will never become obsolete workers. Others are leveraging their ability to make or supplement a living online, buying and selling game cards, sneakers or furniture on Facebook Marketplace, pursuing a real estate license as a second career, or marketing themselves and their work independent of their jobs on social media. Young people are piecing together lucrative, satisfying careers that take up less of their time than most of us spent working. Unlike most of us, our kids will undoubtedly enjoy multiple screams of income.

Truth is, financial possibilities abound for our kids. And we need to let them know that. These slivers of hope are really important to talk about, and can help change the way our kids will think about money and work.

It’s no small thing.

We also need to let them know that a great deal of their earning power, just like ours, will come from their strengths. If your child is charismatic and gregarious and outgoing, sales or marketing or PR might turn out to be the gig that makes them the money that afford them all the things they need. If they are into numbers and stats, a degree from the business school and a job downtown might serve them. If they’re good with their hands, we will always need people in virtually every trade.

And those people make money.

We also have to recognize that we don’t know everything there is to know about money today. We’ve made it in a certain way, and saved in certain ways. This will undoubtedly play out differently for our kids. It already is. I work with fifteen and sixteen-year-olds already putting together stock portfolios, or mock stocks, for business classes in high school. They’re learning a little bit about investing. A lot of them are self-teaching.

Marketing and self-branding online are ever-growing opportunities for abundance in the lives of our kids that we can’t ignore, and that most of us do not fully understand. I think a lot of us dismiss this methodology as shallow and self-centered, but kids tell me, and I am seeing, that this is the future of marketing and advertising. And our kids are nearly as adept at it as they are speaking the English language.

Money is also part of the formula our kids hold for helping others. Our kids are generous and empathic, arguably far more than previous generations. Whereas trickle-down, supply-side economics may not have worked particularly well for our generation, the majority of money lingering stubbornly at the top of the pyramid, our kids are far less likely to embrace the idea of a billionaire. They’re more likely to be generous and tend to those less well off. They talk about it all the time, the embarrassment of riches in our country, and that nobody should go unhoused or hungry. Ensuring people are housed and fed and warm and have their basic needs met is imperative to them.

Practically speaking, none of that comes to fruition without money.

So our job as parents is to keep an open mind about money, and to share that open-mindedness with our children. And we need to provide them with hope. Hope that they can successfully achieve what they want to in this world of opportunity. Money is no small component of their sense of hope. Let’s do our part to fill up that unnecessarily paltry account.