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Children love money, and this can be awkward since they don’t earn or need any. If you offer a child a piece of financial information, you can guarantee that they will enthusiastically repeat it, inaccurately, to an inappropriate audience. A child in possession of a monetary figure — what one of their parents earns in a year, or how much rent their family pays — is a highly volatile combination.
For this reason, among many valid others, most of us don’t talk about money very much with our kids. This leaves a vacuum that is filled with a lot of misinformation, most of which comes from social media. Context cues don’t provide children with as much perspective as one might hope. Recently, I announced to my sons that for the next few months we’d be in “budget mode.” I was trying to make it sound casual and not urgent, just a little bit of transparency about how my fluctuating work schedule would impact our household expenses. My intention was to prepare them to be told “no” about things that had normally been a “yes”: dinner at a restaurant to celebrate a good report card or a trip to Ikea for a new desk setup. The following day, I got a text from my older son during his school lunch hour. The single sandwich he usually took for lunch wasn’t enough, he reported. From now on, he’d like to bring two. “Sorry about the timing of this, cause of budget,” he wrote.
Food insecurity is a persistent problem all over the world, but it’s not one of ours. I guess I was naïve to assume my son would intuit this, from cues such as our two incomes and habit of buying highly unessential cases of seltzer and fancy crackers. But I shouldn’t have been surprised, since all signs point to financial dysphoria being a defining characteristic of growing up in the 21st century.
A recent survey reported in Forbes noted that Gen Z respondents consider the threshold of “financial success” to be an average annual salary of $587.797 and a net worth of $9.47 million. After mopping up the seltzer I spat out after reading those figures, I considered why that might be, and the obvious reason is that influencers and YouTubers gain followers by flaunting their wealth, and children make up a credulous audience. Personal-finance influencers targeting Gen Z invariably position themselves as young self-made millionaires and offer elaborate advice about index funds and brokerage accounts, producing an impression that wealth is a matter of making a series of smart choices. The Forbes article wonders if Gen Z is in for disillusionment as they enter the workforce and realize that most salaries never approach the mid-six-figures, no matter how many promotions you ask for. I’m sure some of them are — but then again, I was disillusioned when I entered the workforce too. It was years before I felt much better than broke. But at least I went into it knowing I’d have to work, a lot, if I expected to afford the kind of life I’d grown up with.
The promise behind a lot of popular advice targeting Gen Z is that wealth is a mind-set, and that by committing yourself to a series of largely arbitrary lifestyle habits, you can “attract wealth.” (There’s an obvious reason this is the kind of financial guidance they’re getting: Manifesting wealth is a lot sexier than maintaining a decent credit score.) I have met preteens who are already espousing this woo-woo pseudoscience, which exists on the same intellectual plane as anti-vaccination rhetoric. Teenagers aren’t being exposed to financial literacy advice with any practical application to their future lives, like how to survive on a starting salary of thirty grand. According to the logic of this worldview, so much as acknowledging the existence of such a starting salary might risk tipping a person into a dreaded poverty mind-set; better, then, to imagine salaries in the half-million range.
Under these circumstances, the most important financial-literacy skill might actually be media literacy — discerning real advice from the fantasy. Just as much as we should be teaching our school-age kids how to handle small amounts of money, we should be explaining how influencers get paid, and how algorithms favor certain kinds of content over others, and how the attention economy works to juice up provocative points of view while ignoring information that is weighed down by the burden of nuance and moderation.
But we can’t expect the media that our children consume to do all the work of teaching them about the world. Some of that education has to happen at home. Among the many parents I know, allowances have fallen out of favor because they are said to create a transactional relationship to chores; children are supposed to learn to help out not because they’re getting paid to do it, but because helping is part of being in a family. But without allowances, it can be hard to create consistency when it comes to giving younger kids their own money to spend. And, perhaps more important, allowances reinforce the intuitive link between money and work. The influence of social media has largely dismantled this link. Being an influencer is notoriously punishing work, but young people are rarely aware of this.
Following the trend, I’ve stopped giving allowances, too, relying instead on a very flawed vibes-based approach. Sometimes I give my children money, and other times I refuse; there is no rhyme or reason to any of it. I expect them to help out at home, but uncoupling chores from money has unfortunately failed to create an atmosphere of joyful cooperation, as I hoped it might. They still hate cleaning up and they still fight over whose turn it is to do anything at all.
I’m thinking about reinstating the allowance, because the lesson that money is linked to work is one that I’m keen to teach. If my children wish to become entrepreneurs, as so many influencers claim to be, they’ll need to learn to work. Whatever they want to be will require work and almost certainly a period during which they won’t make much. Maybe the trick to teaching young people financial literacy is teaching them to endure that period without getting discouraged — and even to take pleasure in work itself.
It feels risky to propose an idea like this, given how exploitative the labor market has become. Should workers at an Amazon fulfillment center be taught to “take pleasure in their work” instead of demanding better working conditions? The pressure on workers is tremendous, from their bosses and from the surveillance tools used to manage them. Maybe it’s not the right time in history to teach kids to be “good workers.”
And yet! Influencers might be telling them otherwise, but the vast majority of children are going to become workers soon, not self-made millionaires who can retire by 45. Their families need to help prepare them for what that means. Once they’re part of the labor market, they aren’t likely to demand to be treated well if they think work itself is for losers, that a poverty mind-set is the reason people get paid minimum wage, and that making an effort on behalf of someone else’s business is a waste of time. Any kind of work, at any level of pay, is inherently dignified when it is done by humans. Maybe that lesson is ultimately more important than how to understand family finances.
The message that children are learning from social media, that the best way to fulfill your potential is to become a vaguely defined “entrepreneur” thanks to a “growth mind-set,” is in full ideological alignment with exploitation. It implies permission to look down on people less fortunate than you, and it conjures a fantasy world where people who “deserve” it get rich and those who don’t simply disappear — it’s a real-life analog to how they are served content. As children get older, they need to understand the link between the very specific logic of the attention economy and the skewed worldview that imagines a world made up of only the super-wealthy. Very few children will ever know that reality. Instead, they will be faced with the challenge of finding meaningful work in a world set up to exploit their labor. They’ll need all the help we can give them.
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