The teen years are a great time to teach our kids valuable skills which will help them once they become adults. However money is one of those crazy topics that many families shy away from talking about. Could you possibly be telling yourself one of these three lies?
They will figure it out once they get out on their own.
Maybe your parents didn’t talk to you about money, and you figured it out. It might work out, but hoping that they figure it out is kind of risky. There is a potential for them getting into a huge amount of debt which may take years to dig out of. The average person was not taught about money growing up and is not doing well financially. Do you want your teen to be average? Wouldn’t it be better to begin teaching them now in a safe environment where the stakes aren’t so high?
I can’t teach my teen about money.
So many parents were never taught about money themselves. You may struggle with feeling inadequate, but you can do this. You may not know yet how to do it, but you can learn. Succeeding with money is only about 20% knowledge and 80% behavior. No one loves your teen and wants them to succeed as much as you do. When we started out as parents, we didn’t know how to do much. But what happened? If it was important to our kids success, we figured it out. Think about all the things that you have learned to do on your parenting journey, you can do this too.
I don’t have time.
I get this one. Life sometimes feels like it is moving so fast and we can barely keep up. It is so easy to push the non-urgent tasks down on the to-do list. But we need to remember our goal. We want to raise kids who can take care of themselves when they leave the nest.
Have you ever heard of the Eisenhower Matrix? The tasks we have to do can be divided into four quadrants – urgent/important, non-urgent/important, urgent, non-important, and non-urgent/ non-important.
Teaching money skills is one of the important, but not urgent tasks. The urgent/important tasks are easier to do because they are in our face and we know they need to get done. The urgent/non-important ones are harder. No one is going to make you do it, but it would be in you and your teen’s best interest to be intentional about focusing on some of those tasks.
Can you eliminate or delegate some of your non-important tasks today to make room for the important ones? If you would like to fill out your own Eisenhower Matrix, I’ve created a blank matrix with instructions that you can download here.
If you would like more support in teaching your teen life and leadership skills, join our free private Facebook community for parents and check out the Raising Confident Teens Podcast!
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