Empowering Children with the Skills They Need for Strong Financial Futures
By Stacey Lindsay
Our relationship to money is broadly formed when we’re kids. Young kids. By the age of three, children understand basic financial concepts. By seven, they form simple money habits. Yet clear financial education greatly lacks, says Dr. Mara Catherine Harvey. “It is possibly the most important skill set in life, and yet we don’t teach it in schools, and we expect people to learn it along the way somehow.”
What this leads to is staggering. If children are not exposed to clear, informative lessons about money early on, certain narratives can take shape and permeate through their lives. Narratives around saving and spending, earning and working, value and worth form and often result in negative consequences—the perpetual gender pay gap being one of the most jarring.
This is what led Harvey to create her new children’s book series, A Smart Way to Start. The concept incubated in her as she’s spent the last twenty years working in finance, reflecting, and experiencing, gender-based inequities. “One day I was keen to have a very simple answer to a very big question, which was: If I have a pay gap all my life, how much less do I have over the arc of my entire life?” Harvey asks. “How much less wealth am I going to accumulate?” When you see the answers to this on a macro scale, and how it adds up over a lifetime, this is fuel for change.
Beautifully illustrated and written in catchy rhymes, A Smart Way to Start is lyrical and fun—and it meets kids (and parents) where they are. Which is pretty intuitive. Kids should have the right to learn about the one thing that has the power to define their lives. And equally enough, parents should have the empowering guidance to teach them. As Harvey puts it, we no longer can afford otherwise. “Anything that we can do to give girls, to give boys, to give children good money skills is going to be giving them a gift for life.”
A Conversation with Dr. Mara Catherine Harvey
Why is teaching children about finances at an early age critical for their financial health and for gender equality?
The way you’re going to interact with money as an adult is largely defined in your early childhood years. This is problematic for the following reasons: There is a lot of research that shows that by the age of ten, girls face pocket money pay gaps. They’re already getting 15-30 percent less than the boys. It could be that they are steered toward more conventional chores, which can be household-related and that are undervalued. And boys seem to have an inclination—certainly driven by society—to be bolder, to ask for more, and to do things where they earn money at a younger age.
This is where the confidence gap comes in. By the age of five, and in primary school, girls seem to self-select, again through all the societal bias around them. They’ll think, I'm not as smart as the boys when it comes to money, or I'm not as smart as the boys when it comes to numbers and math. This is why so many girls don't go into STEM. [These thoughts] are pure bias. On the contrary, girls are often better than the boys in many of these aspects, but they for whatever reason feel far less confident. If those biases are visible at the age of ten, and they mirror what we see in the labor force and in the economy overall, then it has got to do with the money semantics that children grow up with.
You’ve also talked about how varying media messages feed into this.
There has been research done in the UK that focuses on media messages around money. Several hundred articles that relate to money were screened. They found that [the majority of] messages targeting men had to do with earning and investing and making money, and [the majority] of all the messages targeting women had to do with spending. So society and all the messaging around us, all the imagery associated with money, perpetuates this bias. And we cannot ignore the fact that it not only affects us as parents, but it also affects the way we impart the same messages and perpetuate the same stereotypes with children.
So that's really what led me to say we have got to make sure that we stop differentiating the money messages girls grow up with versus the money messages boys grow up with. We need to level the playing field at a very early age. What was intriguing in my journey was after I decided to write this first story, all in rhymes, about how a little girl earns her money and how she finds out that her brother earns a penny more, my daughter read this and she said, ‘Oh Mom, this is delightful, but I don't see the point. I don't see why a girl would get less than a boy.’ And I said, ‘welcome to the club! I also grew up thinking I'm equal to all of the boys. Of course, I'm equal to all of the boys. Why wouldn't I be equal to all of the boys?’
I also grew up thinking that the only limitation in my life would be my intellectual capacity and my willingness to work hard. Little did I know that you hit the age of thirty-five and you realize that didn't quite go as planned. Why are things not advancing the same way they are advancing for my male peers? And it's only much later you realize this because you weren’t aware of the fact that there was going to be a problem.
I would like little girls to be aware of the fact that there was a problem, there still is a problem, and there's likely still to be a problem for the next seven generations, according to the prognostic of the World Economic Forum. If it takes another 200 years to solve gender economic equality, I think our daughters' daughters' daughters' daughters are still going to be here fighting for this same topic. If you're not even aware that there is a problem, how can you possibly be equipped with the skills to fight the problem? And this needs to be true for girls and for boys.
Are your books catered to young girls?
My books are dedicated to the girls, but they are suitable for all the boys, too. The first book in particular, because it tackles gender topics. It has a message to the boys to say, ‘You can play a role in speaking up if you see injustices. You can make the world fairer.’
The series, which consists of five books, explores money and equal pay, but it also extends to other critical issues. Will you take us through the series and how it evolved for you?
The journey started because I wanted to tackle equal pay, and I wanted to find a way to bring the conversation to children. The second element of the books was that if we're going to teach children about money and ethics, I would love to also teach children about sustainability. That every time they're spending their money, they're impacting our world. Even their first penny spent on an ice cream and sweeties is having an impact, depending on which products you choose to buy.
But then I realized it was a bit of a jump explaining the pay gap, at least to five-year-old and six-year-olds. So it became a whole learning journey on money, from earning and equality to learning to save and why money in a piggy bank can't grow. Your money needs to flow in the economy in order to be able to grow—and that this is something very important for your life. Then the third book focuses on spending and trade-offs and patience. The book on spending actually also has a secret chapter on digital money. The same way you can't touch digital money, you cannot touch the book on digital money, so it's an e-book only.
The fourth book is on spending and choices and creating awareness for companies that are doing good things and for companies that are not doing good things. If we ask questions about which companies are doing good and which are not doing so good, answers will follow. It's not always obvious to find the answers, but the important thing is to ask the right questions.
Finally the fifth book is on the seventeen sustainable development goals. It explains them in four lines of rhyme each, and with a little poem to summarize them so you can learn your SDGs by heart and for life. It’s quite an easy and playful way for children to memorize them. It's my way of contributing to broadening out all of the messaging around sustainability.
How did you approach the feat of creating a series that covers weighty topics but is also engaging?
It was important to bring the topics that are very complex, both the money angle and the sustainability angle, to people's fingertips so that it's accessible and so that it's easy. It's fun in a serious way. It's fun because of the rhymes and the melody. It's engaging for the kids because that repetitiveness is something that makes it stick.
My aspiration was when I wrote the first book, I wondered: Will a child actually tell their parents, ‘I want to read this again?’ I was so pleased when the first feedback came from friends of friends who had gifted the book to their niece, and it was the fourth night in a row that she wanted to read the same book.
So many books on money for children are technical, if I can put it that way. They'll explain that there are different coins and different pennies and that you can spend them, and you make choices when you spend them. All that is great. The facts are there, but I found that the engagement with the child wasn't necessarily there, and then it's all up to the parents to create that engagement, of course. But I also felt that we can make it a little easier for the parents. Can we make it engaging so that the child wants to learn more about money and wants to adopt good behaviors because they have a little girl hero in this book?
And this hero is Marty, the little girl protagonist. Marty also lives off the book pages and offers more direction for parents in your newsletters. Will you walk us through this?
For the moment we have a series of newsletter with money tips where we try to engage in conversations and take money moments and reflect on them. What are our children learning? What else could we be doing? All of these enjoyable moments with children, be it out in nature, be it in relation to purchasing something or enjoying a vacation moment, can all have very constructive money messages, and especially sustainability related messages. The monthly tips are there to stimulate that reflection, because I think what is so important is to realize that our children are learning about money whether or not we talk about it.
One of the critical questions I love to ask people is, ‘When was the last time your child saw you saving?’ This skill is very important. If our kids are going to live to the age of 100 plus, and we know our pension systems were not made for supporting thirty years of longevity after retirement, how are our children going to finance their longevity? How will that quality of life be sustained? If we don't have institutional governmental answers to that question, it implies that our children are going to be a generation that is going to have to think really deeply about it.
If we want it to be a habit for children, shouldn't we teach them that habit as early as possible? We start brushing teeth with them extremely early so that it becomes a daily habit. Could we do the same with savings?
How does modeling this behavior play a critical part?
It really needs to be visible. The good old practice of having a piggyback and filling it is actually something super important. Yet in a world where our money has become so digital, we tend to do less and less of that. We tend to say, ‘oh, I've got a savings account, maybe, for my child, and I'll just wire some money onto it monthly.’ Or ‘my child doesn't see me saving because I'm doing it all digitally.’ How do you cope with role modeling to your child something that you want them to learn? Because teaching a child just to save digitally? That's going to be a really tough learning curve.
You’re also formulating a parenting guide that will unveil critical opportunities to teach important lessons and reflect on moments around money. What are some messages that you’ll be including?
Speaking to many parents, the following debate always comes up: Should we pay children to do chores? I'm an advocate for yes, which I’ll explain. But I’ll start with an example of how things are handled in Switzerland. There's governmental agency that recommends how to introduce money to children, which says it's a good practice to give a child one franc a week, or $1, in first grade, $2 a week in second grade, $3 a week in third grade, and so gradually they get more responsibility for money. Now if you decompose that, what is your child learning? Five years of primary school, and every year they get a dollar more, right? And the little amount of money they get, they're allowed to go and buy a sweetie or whatever a child would buy. Essentially, we've spent five years explaining to children money is a gift, you can spend it on whatever you want, and it correlates with age—which are all messages that are just wrong. We then get to secondary school and we have to cancel out of the memory of our children all those bad money messages to implant new messages, which is that money doesn't correlate with age. As a teenager, you're not going to get more money every year and you cannot spend it on everything you want.
I feel like it's a completely missed opportunity if we spend that time imparting the wrong money messages to children as opposed to reflecting on how we can impart the right money messages very early on. I'm not saying that we should pay our kids every time they lift a finger in the household. But I do think there can be specific chores that could be pinpointed as money moments and learning opportunities. It could be things that you do sporadically, like cleaning the windows. Even a small child can take a cloth into their hand and help, and you can say, ‘Okay, if we do this and we do this well, we all are going to earn a dollar.’ And children can also learn that different chores have different values. This is super important for girls who need to learn to negotiate, and they need to learn to not be self-selecting to always the lowest paying things just because society has steered them towards those professions. It is important to start that conversation at an early stage to empower girls to talk about money.
These are messages that I want to help parents unpack. I don’t think there is a right or wrong way of doing things, strictly speaking. It is about mindfulness. It is about thinking about what your child is learning either because you are doing something or are not doing something.
What advice would you give to parents who feel overwhelmed by talking to their child about money, or feel that they may be too late?
I would say it's never too late to start and it's also never too soon to start. Just wanting to start is a great step forward. I would also say it really isn't difficult, but there are some concrete steps that you can take. It is about saying, ‘Whatever you've been doing so far, let's just hit the pause button, and let's go back and think about what is important to us as a family when we think about money?’ Also, which emotions are attached to money? Because it could be that indeed money is a stress factor. Even just to acknowledge that and to say, ‘it is a stress factor for me right now, but is that what I want my child to learn about money?’ Try to take distance between where you are right now and what is it that actually you'd like your child to learn.
I do hope that my books can be helpful even for parents with slightly older children, too. While the books are targeted towards primary school children, I've had such positive feedback from parents with teenagers because it is about engaging in a fun conversation. To have a conversation about, ‘do we have a defined set of chores? Where are the earning learning opportunities? That's a great starting point.
The second is then really the savings topic to say, ‘Okay, do I have something as basic as a savings jar?’ So if I want to pay my kids, am I maybe just paying them digitally today and say, ‘I'm going to load $10 onto your Apple account and you can spend it online,’ or am I actually giving them a physical experience?
And last but not least, spending and spending choices is a very easy one. We go out shopping daily, weekly, monthly for anything that we need on a recurring basis, and all of those opportunities are great opportunities just to have a conversation with your child. To have a conversation about how much something costs, why do we need to check expiration dates on things, why do we need to look at quality? These daily conversations can just trickle into what you're already doing. You don't have to throw your life upside down to become a money role model with your child. You just need to make it visible and make it a conversation.
To learn more about Dr. Mara Catherine Harvey and her series, A Smart Way to Start visit smartwaytostart.com.
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