Do you remember, when you were a child, the aching boredom and anticipation of ‘saving up for something’? And the adrenalin rush when the day finally came that you had ‘enough’ and off you skipped to the shops to induce a retail therapy induced high? I won’t ever forget buying my first Walkman (which was the size of a brick) after a very, long hard summer of saving the whole TWENTY SIX POUNDS that it cost. My Mum used to pay me 50p to tidy the airing cupboard and other sundry chores, my Dad 50p for washing the car. I think a couple of WHOLE POUNDS changed hands for creosoting the garden fence. Bit by bit I saved it up and squirreled it away in my plastic ‘Fred’ Homepride moneybox until the joyous day arrived and off I trotted to Argos. I kind of miss those days of ‘saving up’; I suppose credit cards and a little bit of financial security has knocked that on the head. We save, but for those ‘roof falling off’ type scenarios and for that Great Unknown…’the future’. We don’t have savings accounts for the Megaboys specifically, but perhaps we should?
When Bertie turned 5 a few weeks ago we decided to give him a little bit of pocket money each week. When he’s a little older he will be given jobs to do in return for the pocket money but, for now, he gets the money in return for good behaviour and doing as he is asked. It’s not a lot of money, £2.00 a week, but it’s enough to blow on plastic tat in the toyshop. We use the coins to talk about value, and for simple sums. He seems pretty chuffed with having his own money and likes to keep track of his ‘purse’ and how much he has in it. He’s also developing a good sense of what he can afford and, just in the last week, the sense of ‘saving up’ for something that you really would like. You can see the internal dilemma on his face as he talks about it. He really, really would like a Hello Kitty café (yes, really) but they are £8.00 and that means not spending any of his money for four weeks. Is it worth the sacrifice? I’m trying to encourage him to go down this route, not because I am looking forward to extracting 45 pieces of tiny pink plastic tat from under every cupboard in the house, but because I think it’s good to learn fiscal good sense early in life.
So, I’m expecting my 5 year old to learn about saving but I don’t actually save for him and his future. It’s a kind of double standard unless you take the hard nosed view that children need to learn to stand on their own feet and financial handouts don’t necessarily help them longer term. Where is the incentive to work hard and ‘make something of yourself’ if your parents hand the generous allowance/university fees/car/deposit on a house/wedding of your dreams to you on a plate?
It’s a topic I’ve talked about with various people recently and it makes for fascinating discussion. As parents, we want the best for our children but at what point does ‘the best’ mean foisting them out of their middle class, duckdown anti-allergenic nest and letting them get on with it? What’s the best way to encourage independence, forcing them to pay for themselves once they leave secondary education? Is that fair because, being so ancient, MrSpud and I didn’t pay to go to university and we even got a bit of a government grant to help cover living expenses. So would it be fair not to contribute to our boys’ tertiary education (if they go down that route) in the knowledge that it will saddle them with huge debt at the start of their working lives. Would such an arrangement put them off thinking about university, or would it focus their ambitions on what is financial prudent long term (in terms studying a vocational subject, or whether to undertake any further study at all)?
I have such mixed feelings about it. I want my children to be happy and fulfilled. I don’t want to bring them up expecting to live their lives in the manner to which they are accustomed without a lot of hard work on their part. But, then, I want to let them experience things that MrSpud and I didn’t growing up due to financial pressures. Equally, we didn’t exactly suffer from not going skiing/having a pony etc etc etc.
I know of one couple that decided they didn’t want their son to have debts when he graduated so they paid for all his tuition and living expenses for three years. Unbeknown to them he took out the loans AS WELL and lived the high life on a combination of their generosity and debt.
Others have paid for their children’s living expenses, on the basis that if they were living at home the parents would incur those expenses anyway (er, if they were living at home surely they should be paying board & keep?).
And then I heard of a very wealthy couple that couldn’t decide where the ‘line’ is, the point at which you say ‘that’s enough’ to your children. So they gave a lump sum to each child on their 18th birthday and told them to use it as they wished but there would be no more handouts. The children could use it to party with, or for university fees, or for a car, a deposit on a flat or a wedding. That seems like a sensible idea but I’d be afraid they would blow the lot and I’d be furious.
We stopped making payments in to the boys’ Child Trust Funds recently for just this reason. MrSpud was never comfortable about handing over a large sum of money to the boys without any kind of control from us and, as time has gone on, I tend to agree. But are we being mean? When I was 17 my Dad gave me money from a savings plan he’d taken out when I was born. He’d intended to buy me a car with the money but, um, £300 didn’t buy a car in 1988. So he gave me the money and said I could do as I pleased with it. I’d never had anything like this kind of money before, it was a fortune to me. But I was a sensible soul and spent it on trainfares and accommodation for my university interviews and auditions and I bought a camera. Hardly raving was I?
But what if my boys aren’t so square as me? What if we handed them a substantial pot of savings and they spent it all on beer or worse? Wouldn’t we feel cheated of our hard earned cash?
But, if we save FOR them but only allow the money to spent as we desire are we controlling them? Would I be saving for a ‘mummy approved’ future rather than the ones they hope and aspire to themselves?
I don’t know the answer to any of the questions that I’m posing. I know I need to teach my boys about the value of money and the satisfaction that comes from earning a crust. But how much of a ‘leg up’ do we give them to help them on their way?
In the meantime all I can do is encourage Bertie to savour the joy of delayed gratification that ‘saving up’ for something special gives. And hope that his taste in Objects of Desire improves.
Most Commented Posts
