Why Your Money Story Begins Before Age 7 |
Research suggests the cognitive foundations for financial habits are largely laid by around age 7.
Parental silence around money predicts worse credit-card and financial behavior in adult children.
Recognizing your first money memory is one of the simplest starting points for rewriting the story.
In my last post, I wrote about a question my 8-year-old, Sam, asked me one morning at the breakfast table. Today, I want to look in the other direction, to my own childhood, and what that has to do with the financial realities today.
We were two children, one employed adult, and Christmas was coming. My parents were managing, but only just, and they had gradually begun to lower expectations, perhaps their own as well.
So they told their 5-year-old daughter, well in advance, that Santa Claus had received so many letters that winter that he had run out of presents. Santa is generous, they explained, but Santa is not bottomless. Everybody knew, of course, that Santa did not actually manufacture the gifts. He bought them, like anyone else.
For a 5-year-old, this was a disaster.
But children often have an unnerving ability to solve problems before the adults around them notice. I went to my room, found old toys, and wrapped them carefully. One for my mother, one for my father, one for each of my grandparents, and some for myself and my brother. By the morning, I had become, in my own mind, the hero of Christmas. There would be presents under the tree. There would be the best part of Christmas, the opening. I had solved the first money problem of my life and brought joy to my family.
This is my first memory of........