By making money-talk taboo at home, we slow down our kids' progress towards financial literacy.
Gautam Chikermane
YOU MUST be out of your bloody mind. That’s the most perverted thing I’ve ever heard. Why do you want to corrupt the minds of these kids?" The shock was genuine, so was the anger. Not surprising when someone tells you that he wants to teach your children about money. "Money? For God’s sake, money is at the root of all evil... children must be kept away from it." But the same parents who so vociferously condemn this "misdirected enterprise" (to educate children about money) spend thousands of rupees– often dollars too–on them, and not just on necessities like their education, but on excesses like cellphones and ludicrously large libraries of video games. In their own lives, they certainly desire it. Lust for it. Worship it. Even fear it–perhaps because they don’t much understand it. Is that what explains this schizophrenic ambivalence about money: lust for it when you are an adult and do your damnedest to guard children from its "corrupting influence"?
Opinion in Outlook Money
Showing posts with label children. Show all posts
Showing posts with label children. Show all posts
Saturday, June 15, 2002
Tuesday, April 30, 2002
Don't kill your child's instinct to succeet
By giving our children everything they desire without any effort, we could be killing their instinct to succeed tomorrow.
Gautam Chikermane
THE FIVE children–two girls and three boys, age three to six–frolicked in the small, plastic pool. It was a delight to see them fight the early-summer heat by splashing water on one another, turning into mermaids, crocodiles and fish, as the colours of Holi turned the pool from yellow to red to green. It was also an experience that offered insights into the process of wealth creation. Four of the children were from well-off, even wealthy, homes. The fifth one–let’s call him Hari–was the son of a government clerk. What his family spent in a year would be about one to two months’ expenses of the others’. Hari did not have expensive toys like the other children did; he had never seen a home pool. The other children were completely unaware of the economic divide between him and them, and although Hari was conscious of the divide, the child in him rejected these artificial layers of separation that build walls between adults.
The quintet moved on, from the pool to the cycles to the lunch table to the mom-and-pop games. In all the activities, there was only one leader: Hari. He only had to see a toy being used once and he’d master it. He was the organiser of all kinds of games: making a ‘house’ with dining chairs for walls and bedsheets for a roof, teaching them to pedal more efficiently, hold their breaths underwater and blow bubbles, and generally creating magic out of the ordinary. Hari, I felt, characterised the spirit of enterprise: he had nothing, not even a knowledge of how the remote-controlled jeeps and the other gadgets worked. But he created conditions under which the other children became his followers, chanting "Hari bhaiya, Hari bhaiya", doing what he told them to and having a great time. If he keeps at it, he could end up very wealthy.
Column in Outlook Money
Gautam Chikermane
THE FIVE children–two girls and three boys, age three to six–frolicked in the small, plastic pool. It was a delight to see them fight the early-summer heat by splashing water on one another, turning into mermaids, crocodiles and fish, as the colours of Holi turned the pool from yellow to red to green. It was also an experience that offered insights into the process of wealth creation. Four of the children were from well-off, even wealthy, homes. The fifth one–let’s call him Hari–was the son of a government clerk. What his family spent in a year would be about one to two months’ expenses of the others’. Hari did not have expensive toys like the other children did; he had never seen a home pool. The other children were completely unaware of the economic divide between him and them, and although Hari was conscious of the divide, the child in him rejected these artificial layers of separation that build walls between adults.
The quintet moved on, from the pool to the cycles to the lunch table to the mom-and-pop games. In all the activities, there was only one leader: Hari. He only had to see a toy being used once and he’d master it. He was the organiser of all kinds of games: making a ‘house’ with dining chairs for walls and bedsheets for a roof, teaching them to pedal more efficiently, hold their breaths underwater and blow bubbles, and generally creating magic out of the ordinary. Hari, I felt, characterised the spirit of enterprise: he had nothing, not even a knowledge of how the remote-controlled jeeps and the other gadgets worked. But he created conditions under which the other children became his followers, chanting "Hari bhaiya, Hari bhaiya", doing what he told them to and having a great time. If he keeps at it, he could end up very wealthy.
Column in Outlook Money
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