I actually teach financial literacy in school but when it comes to my four-year-old boy, I realise that I have to throw things like differentiating needs from wants and minimalism and budgeting out of the window. For one, he’s too young to understand the distinction between a want and a need. For another, he thinks that him wanting to buy a toy is a reason robust enough. Thirdly, he’s at the age where he wants to have the same thing in all shapes and sizes so that he can start a collection. It doesn’t help when he knows how to say 大中小 (big, medium, small) and 一家人 (they are one family), so he wants to have many kinds of the same toy. Guess I taught him Chinese too well.
Here’s the thing. Toddlers are awfully persistent, so if he has his heart on a toy, he will keep pestering me to buy it until my will bends. But of course, I don’t think it’s healthy to pander to him every time he wants something. So, I recently started him on a savings program. The latest animal toy he craves for costs $7, so I give him 50 cents almost every day. This means that I have effectively bought 2 weeks’ worth of time for myself.
He saves the coins in a metal box, and every time I give him a 50 cents, I make him learn the number of 50 cents coins he still needs to accumulate. Through sheer repetition, he’s very familiar with the phrase 五毛钱 (50 cents).
This process also induces a mindset change in me. From being doubtful that I’m spoiling him rotten, I now root for him to reach his goal, so giving him 50 cents isn’t Ad painful as before.
Though I must confess that on some days, I use the 50 cents to bribe him. Here’s a parenting tip: toddlers will scream bloody murder when you need to inject eye drops into their eyes. So I shamelessly give him the 50 cents coin to hold while putting the eye drops as fast as I can. Sigh. I have no bandwidth to ponder about how materialistic he might turn out to be. That 50 cents coin buys me peace and helps me get the job done.
This is a four-year-old boy’s relationship with money. This was written at The Entertainer where I was bored watching him play with the Triceratops models. He walked out of the store without clamouring to buy one, so I’m proud 👍