It’s tempting to give our kids all they want. We love them and want them to love us, and an easy way to get that gratification high is satisfying wants. I ask a question of you today. Why is it important to not only resist these urges, but also teach your children the importance of saving, and self-control?
It is important to teach your kids the importance of saving for their success, your relationship, and your wallet. Children primarily learn from habits and correlations, and building that relationship between saving and success is important early on.
Being a millionaire is within reach of everyone. Good spending habits, proper budgeting and investments, and consistent work ethic are all that is necessary. All of these things are heavily tied with patience and perseverance, the two keys taught by saving and developing self-control.
“Once a child has actively constructed patterns from their experience through these inductive reasoning processes, they start to apply the patterns identified and learnt in the first context to make sense of a new experience or new information related to a separate context. This capacity to transfer learning or ‘generalise’ from one situation to another, explains how children adapt to new situations, and start to tackle new challenges and problems (e.g. Chen & Siegler, 2000).”
-Dr David Whitebread & Dr Sue Bingham
Habit Formation and Learning in Young Children
As children learn to put money aside, they’ll be able to appreciate the bigger things that they’re able to purchase later on. This promotes their maturity and can result in a better understanding of long term consequences.
Discipline is the ability to overcome the natural man, and choose the less convenient path. Many parents are faced with children who shirk good spending habits for instant gratification. This can be dangerous. A key to joy is being able to be in control of your life and assets. It is crucial to help our children see that money is survival, and the ability to control it is prosperity.
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