All parents show a great deal of concern over the future of their children and feel a need to help them prepare for it. This is usually done in a number of ways, including emphasising the importance of education, providing a healthy lifestyle and trying to instil good manners and behaviours.
With the announcement that personal finance lessons will be included in the National Curriculum for 11 – 16 year olds, it appears that the government is attempting to take some responsibility for future financial attitudes.
Here we take a look at how parents’ involvement in teaching their children budgeting skills could have benefits in the future.
Many experts argue that it has never been more important for young people to develop a deeper understanding of personal financial responsibility and how the system around them works. As financial matters and national and international economic arrangements become ever more complicated, it can often feel as if this would be an impossible task.
However, by helping introduce basic budgeting skills and ideas at an early age, parents can begin to lay the foundations for financially responsible behaviour in the future.
As your children grow and develop into teenagers and adults that are fully responsible for their own money and that also need to enter into the world of work and business in order to support themselves, these lessons can often determine their level of success.
While the government hopes to implement a curriculum that emphasises lessons on taxes, debt, credit and financial products, the beauty of teaching your children at home is that you can impart the knowledge you feel important.
All of this is particularly true if your child ends up with an entrepreneurial spirit and starting up their own business. Many of the qualities required by business managers, particularly those running small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) will be self taught and rooted in those business principles learnt from previous experience.
For instance, a good understanding of how to budget efficiently will definitely give your child an advantage when it comes to using online small business accounting software like Cashbook from Sage One.
Alternatively, early lessons related to healthy borrowing will contribute to a much more developed understanding of how to finance a small business in the right way.
Teaching your children such important lessons at an early age will definitely decrease the possibility of them making big mistakes in the future and should give them an advantage over others when it comes to first making money out in the competitive world of work.
With a greater number of young adults severely lacking these skills, a good financial grounding could make all the difference.