Teach Your Kids to Fish

I am playing upon the old saying:

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”

Specifically, I am applying this to financial literacy. We live in a world that is ruled by money. It is our universal language and religion. Everyone plays by the same rules, and it trumps most ideologies and moral aptitudes. We are thrust into a game that has defined rules that we are forced to play by, yet we are wholly unprepared to play because no-one taught us the rules.

Financial literacy is not taught in school, yet I would suggest it is far more useful to our life than advanced calculus. We are doing our children a disservice by not preparing them for the real world. 

There was a generation of parents that believed that they should “Give my kids everything I didn’t have”. This produced a generation of shallow, entitled whiners who expected the world to owe them something . This sentiment is reflected in the writings of many authors today. 

“I think the major factor is that the boomers grew up in a time of uninterrupted prosperity. And so they simply took it for granted. They assumed the economy would just grow three percent a year forever and that wages would go up every year and that there would always be a good job for everyone who wanted it.” - Bruce Gibney author of A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

Jordan Peterson in his book 12 rules for life talks about how it is so wrong to focus on protecting our children from hardship, rather than prepare them for it. We would be far better off teaching them to stand up to bullies than to try to eliminate bullying. Giving a child a trophy for participating is not helping them. It is making them weak. 

So to circle back to my point, we need to teach kids how to manage money. We need to teach them how to invest. We need to teach them how capitalism works.  We need to teach them the underlying principles that are the foundation of our society. We cannot allow them to wander around thinking the modern world just magically exists. We need to make sure they know how everything came about - through hard-work, ingenuity, and sacrifice.

We Need to Know it First

In order to teach our kids how money works, we need to understand it ourselves. We need to educate ourselves to the best of our abilities and implement what we learn. We need to make mistakes and be humble enough to learn from those who can teach us. 

We need to get over the idea that money is a touchy subject that is not spoken about in polite company. Let your kids see you paying the bills. Talk to them about your investments. Explain to them what your strategy is and how you came up with it. Be enthusiastic about the journey and let them know how important it is to know these things. 

Make them earn it

Above all, don’t give them everything that you didn’t have. I heard someone say recently:

“Don't give your children everything you didn’t have. Teach them everything you didn’t know”

Or something along those lines. It is the best advice I’ve heard in a long time. We need to not only take money matters into our own hands and learn to invest and build wealth, we need to pass that information along. 

The days of..

• Go to school

• Get good grades

• Go to college

• Get a good job

• Work faithfully for 40 years

• Retire with a pension

..are OVER. 

There are very few jobs I would classify as “safe” or “steady” anymore. The world has changed since our parent’s working days. Companies disappear due to technological advances. Skills become obsolete quickly. Corporate ideologies are more severe these days, choosing to lay off staff rather than miss a quarterly target. You cannot rely on anyone else to take care of you anymore. It is up to you to ensure your financial future and this is lesson number one to relay to your kids. Teach them to take care of themselves.

I was quite inspired by the movie “Captain Fantastic” where a father raises his children in the woods and teaches them survival and challenges them intellectually. The lessons prove to be not super relevant in the modern world, but the spirit of independence and self-efficacy were super powerful. It was a cool example of the right approach, however fantastical it was.

I know it is difficult to raise children these days as they have so many outside influences on them. We are all stretched in many directions and having the time to devote to their financial education can sometimes feel impossible between piano lessons and soccer practice. However, managing money is a part of everyone’s life and we are forced to find time to pay bills, balance budgets, and make decisions. Try to let your little angels see your decision making process. Let them in on how things work financially. It would be beneficial for them to realize that electricity to power their video games is not free. I know it can feel like we are making them bitter by telling them how the real world works, but I think it is not like that at all.

The more I learn about money, finance and investing, the more excited I get. I tell my kids everything I learn and they have started investing themselves. I realize that life doesn’t have to be a struggle if we choose to better ourselves and learn how wealth creation happens. I gain a bit of wisdom and then I share my revelations with them. If you have the opinion that the world of money is cruel, harsh and dog-eat-dog then you are only seeing one perspective. Yes, the world of money can be nasty but money is also a means to help others in need. It enables us to have time freedom to pursue all manner of humanistic pursuits. Money is not evil, what you do with it is the true nature of the beast.

By educating ourselves and then teaching what we learn to our kids, we are helping them feed themselves for a lifetime. We should try to instil in them the desire to learn more and take chances. We show them that the world is truly full of opportunity, and that it is up to them to take advantage of those opportunities. The world will not give them anything for free. I also believe that kids will more likely do as you do, not what you say. If they witness you learning, growing and pursuing self improvement, they will take that to heart. If they see you carefully planning your wealth creation plan and executing on it, they will not only see that it is possible, but they will set new expectations for themselves. Your example is massively powerful. 

Empowering our kids, instead of sheltering them seems like the right thing to to. In theory it should be a no brainer, but in practice we hate to see them stumble and fail. I get it. But failure is a great teacher and those lessons tend to stick with you.