Parents skip money homework
Wellington financial educator Dean Blair was shocked to find that only 12 out of 120 children on his money courses had help from their parents to complete the homework.
Blair, from FoxPlan, runs money boot camps for young professionals and has recently started taking his four-week courses into schools to teach 10 to 12-year-olds.
But when he asked children at one boot camp series in Wellington to get their parents to help with a household budget project, he was dismayed that just one in 10 students completed the task.
‘‘It’s clear from the boot camps we ran here that the students aren’t working through money management concepts at home with their parents like they would mathematics or English homework,’’ he said.
‘‘I thought, ‘Oh, my God. We are still two generations away from getting this sorted. If we can teach this generation, they will think it is normal to teach the next generation.’’
Blair said if parents were either not prepared to talk about money with their children, or were ill equipped to teach them, then schools had a duty to do so.
The homework he set was involved, but not hard. He asked the students to create a hypothetical budget with their parents on how much it costs to run a household for a month.
He was astounded by the lack of engagement from the parents, and said this had to change.
The need has become especially pressing as children will be expected to make serious financial decisions early in life, such as taking out a student loan.
A 2015 report by the Commission for Financial Capability showed that teachers believe that students’ money management skills are low, and that students themselves want to learn about money in the classroom.