THIS is the time of year when many grandparents struggle to figure out what to get their grandchildren for the holidays — and many parents, stuck in the middle, worry that those presents will be too indulgent. Instead, a group of financial educators is advocating that grandparents, with their children’s support, give their grandchildren the gift of financial awareness.
“Grandparents are looking for opportunities to interact with their grandchildren, so why not add financial literacy to their repertoire?” said Susan J. Bruno, a certified public accountant and co-founder of CollegeDivaCFO.com, which aims to educate college-age women about financial matters. “They want to be taught. It just has to be relevant in the moment.”
Most grandparents, she said, have an advantage over parents: They can talk more freely with their grandchildren and, in return, their grandchildren tend to open up to them.
The fear, of course, is that grandparents are going to meddle and make life more difficult for their adult children. This can certainly happen — just as easily as grandparents can give their grandchildren all the big-ticket items that their parents say the grandchildren themselves should be saving money for. But many busy parents need someone to help them.
“Parents are overwhelmed by all their responsibilities when it comes to raising a child and doing it right,” said Susan Beacham, chief executive of Money Savvy Generation. “Why not take this help?
“Some parents fear they are handing their children over to their grandparents and they’ll never get them back,” but that is nonsense, she said. “What I tell adult parents is at the end of the day, the most impactful teacher in a child’s life is you,” she said. “Don’t worry if your parents get involved and go astray, because you’ll have the final word.”
This sounds wonderful. But how should it be done? Here is a little nonshopping holiday guide for grandparents looking for ways to connect with grandchildren about financial matters.
Of course, it all starts with a conversation, but the form that talk takes matters. The Rev. Davis Fisher, an Episcopalian minister, a former private banker and the grandfather of eight, said he was always fascinated with how people lived with money — not how they made, invested and spent it — from his time as a local minister on up through his career in business. When he became a grandfather, he felt it was important to talk to his grandchildren about this and to have deeper conversations with them than how their day at school was.
With their parents’ consent, he started giving his grandchildren “money savvy pigs,” which Ms. Beacham created to show children the four uses of money: save, spend, donate and invest. (She now has a cow, as well as a football and a soccer ball for older children.) He asked them to divide their allowances into the four categories, and they would talk about those decisions at their regular breakfasts.
With his granddaughter Morgan, he said, they discussed the different words on the pig, and that led to broader discussions about what she was overhearing from her parents and friends about money. A memorable conversation was about why her friend got $10 a week when she got only $8. (Maybe she had more things to pay for, he told her.)
“Kids pick up on all the money stuff, but they don’t have any context for it,” he said. “They just know there is a lot of emotion around it.”
He didn’t push the subject, but instead waited for it to come up. “We were talking about money topics and it would be very focused,” he said. “But we were talking about other things, too. It was, ‘Let’s go out and spend a little time talking.’ ”
When she was 8, he said, he brought up the idea of giving away some of the money in the donate part of her bank. She had $30, and he threw in $100 for the “Morgan/Papa Philanthropy Fund.” He then gave her a copy of the Episcopal Relief and Development catalog, which lets people pay for specific things to help people in developing countries, like a flock of chickens, mosquito nets or vocational training.
At their next breakfast, she told him she wanted to donate a latrine. “I was dumbfounded,” Mr. Fisher said. “I thought she’d want to buy a cute little goose.”
