The Mistakes Parents Make with Money Education

0:00 Esther I used to think that I was protecting my kids by not talking about money stress. What I was actually doing was teaching them that money was something to be afraid of. I thought being generous with money was more important than being consistent. I was wrong about that too. Today we're sharing our mistakes because the lessons cost us and maybe they don't have to cost you. The biggest mistakes is one we've already talked about, not talking about money at all, but I want to go deeper. When we're going through a tight season financially, I thought hiding it from the kids was protecting them. They don't need to worry about adult problems. But what they actually experienced was stress without context, tension without explanation, and they made up their own stories about what was happening. When we finally talked about it, age appropriately of course, the relief was visible. They understood, they wanted to help, they felt like they were part of the team. We've got a situation right now where one of our kids is going on a trip and it's for school so it's great. He wants one of us to go with them. Does that make sense financially? We're talking about it, we're having an honest conversation and we still haven't decided. One of us might go, but a big part of the decision is financial. It's so nice to be able to have the conversation with them in terms of money and just be honest. Like hey, Joseph, let's look at how much this cost, what do you think would be worth it for us to come? I like that our kids are able to talk about money openly and honestly. What I also take out of that is that he knows that we're simply not just choosing to not go with him to this thing that's a huge part of who he is. It isn't that because we like the other kids better than we like him. It's just it's a financial decision that we have to make because if we put that money here that means that we're not going to enjoy other things. For both of us, including him, is your presence really that it's a cost, does the cost outweigh his feelings. I do like that we have that conversation with him because I think he'll go in understanding and not feel like we're not supportive because we are. We're doing everything else to make sure that he's enjoying what he's doing but being with him at this trip is just not financially the best thing for us to do at the moment. But we are still thinking about it. So hopefully we can come up with different ways to make it work. Mistake number two is inconsistency. This one is on me. Early on I was inconsistent with the rules. Sometimes allowance was tied to chores. Sometimes it wasn't. Sometimes I'd bail the kids out. Sometimes I wouldn't. What that taught them was that rules are negotiable. That if they pushed hard enough, they might get what they wanted. Consistency matters more than the specific rule. Pick a system and stick with it. Adjust as needed but not in the moment. That's a mistake I make. It's adjusting in the middle. Yeah, let's talk about that. So we've got, I think this is something that parents often do. They set up these unspoken rules. For the most part, members of the family know the unspoken rule. But unless you discuss it and stay consistent with it, there's always opportunities for kids to get exceptions. Then once you grant one exception, you don't have a system anymore. Then it's easier to let the discipline break down.

3:44 Esther We've talked a lot about how legacy is built on discipline and consistency. Consistency. What I've seen and we do to adults is we always want to figure out the easy way to do things. Sometimes we want to figure out a way to not do anything at all. It's the same thing that mindset, you don't get it when you're an adult. It's in you, it's nately. The kids also have the same mindset. As the adult, because we know, it's up to us to be consistent. Yeah. So I think one of the things that we've done to maintain consistency is we have our regular check-ins with the kids, both as a whole family and then our one-on-one check-ins. And we write things down. Yes, we do. So that's a good thing, right? Because sometimes we forget what the rules are, right? If you're making decisions in the moment to try to make the best of a situation, you might be making a good decision. But so many things are happening with the kids that we don't always remember what that decision was or what it was based on. And so the next time something comes around, the situation might be different and call for kind of a different application of the rule. But too late, we don't remember what we were thinking back then. Well guess who remembers them though? The kids. Yeah, exactly. They always remember, even though you don't even remember the conversation, so writing things down and one of the things that we do, we have a family messaging group. So if there are important things that we want to make sure that everyone knows, we put it in there. That way no one can say, oh, I didn't know. Oh, I don't remember. It's like sometimes it's better for us to go back and scroll through and make sure that we're even aware of what we said. The third mistake is rescue mode. This is probably my biggest, what would you call it, not downfall. Like it is my biggest temptation. Temptation, yes, definitely. This is hard for loving parents. Your child makes a mistake, spends all their money, loses your savings, whatever. And you want to fix it. But rescuing them from every consequence just teaches them that consequences don't stick. That someone will always be there to bail them out. We've had to watch our kids experience the pain of poor decisions. It's uncomfortable, but that's where the real learning happens. I want to talk about that for a little bit. Yes. Discomfort is where learning happens. No learning ever happens unless you're uncomfortable out of your comfort zone stretching yourself in tension. So I just think of when the kids are learning to swim. What's the classic thing? They learn by increments, the body movements, the staff float. And then there's always that moment that is kind of like a threshold moment in the kids learning. They could swim on their own, but they don't quite know it yet. And so they want help swimming. And so a good swimming teacher, well, I don't know. Maybe what I do, I don't know if I'm a good swimming coach. But what I do is I say, I'm right here. And I'm like just a little bit away from them.

6:38 Esther And I never let them come to me, right? I just keep moving away so that they have that comfort that I'm nearby. But they're really doing all the work. So they're still a little uncomfortable, but they're not so uncomfortable that they've lost confidence. Or trust. Yeah. So I think the same thing is true with finances. We give our kids opportunities to exercise, practice their skills without holding their hands. I just want to also mention that that experience that you just mentioned about teaching people how to swim, that is not the experience that I had. It's just chucky in the river. I left. And so my swimming experience is still flawed. This is like the African way versus the American way. Yes. Teaching kids how to swim. Yes. So it's like if you want to swim enough and then you'll out-outrace the crocodiles. Oh, the mommy what does? No. I'm more a rescuer because you don't want to see your kids hurt. But it is important to allow them to be uncomfortable. And like you said, just be a little bit further away and move a little bit to allow them to grow themselves. So where were you when I was a little kid? So you could have taught me how to swim. Getting hurt. The risk of getting hurt, the risk of making a mistake that does come with some pain, that is a critical piece in anybody's learning, especially children, right? If they don't face risk, they're not going to learn how to control themselves. It goes along with physical play. It's the same with driving. And it's certainly true for money. If they don't have the risk of feeling those consequences with their own money, then they will never learn how to or they won't learn appropriately how to properly use money with discipline. I feel like all the analogies that you're giving or all the analogies that have just been like really difficult for me, swimming and teaching them how to drive have been both very scary experiences for me. But I do see your point in making sure that they learn and be uncomfortable because I still have my own company. Like I'm still uncomfortable seeing them manage things like that. But I think the support that you give me allows me to hide behind you. This might be like jumping up and rescuing them. This might be like going far field, but the book that you read anti-fragile, that's about right, building systems that develop resiliency so that when there is a setback, it makes the system stronger or it makes the person stronger. And if you remove all potential risks from that system, it becomes a fragile system and you can't avoid risks forever, right? Something bad is going to happen. It's going to be a financial, something out of our control, right? Like a financial downturn or interest rates go way up or housing prices or the labor market, the employment situation is really against kids at some point, right? You just can't predict everything. And when they run into that problem, if they're not resilient and they haven't had those experiences, they're going to fail. This is why we work. We're complete opposites.

9:46 Esther But we balance each other out because I tend to be more of the not so much pushover, but you bring the logic into things. You're the nurturer. I am the nurturer for sure. And I'm okay with that. Mistake number four, lecturing instead of involving. I had a tendency, still do sometimes, to turn every moment into a lecture. Maybe you've experienced that here on this podcast. Kids ask about money? 20-minute explanation. What works better is involving them. Instead of explaining budgeting, let them help with the budget. Instead of lecturing about saving, let them track their own savings. Experience beats lecture every time. I know I need to do more of this, but there's so much to teach kids. And we take lots of opportunities to teach them, and I don't think we should stop doing that, right? But how much more powerful is it if we're talking about, we've had this conversation recently with our daughter when she was buying car insurance. We were explaining to her why she was not allowed to drive our car without insurance. And we had this conversation about risk. She might have understood 10% of that. And I think it's good that we had that conversation with her because there'll be another opportunity where she'll have it again and she'll learn more and build on that. How much more powerful would it have been to go with her to online to the computer and look at an actuarial table or look at a policy with different risk analyses, different coverages and show her how that affects the premium. Or maybe ask her to go look up stats on who gets in more accidents or who's responsible for the most speeding violations. She's your brother's. I know. We did that one time. What were we talking about where we said go online and figure it out? What was it? It was something financial. It was just trying to get her to figure out what insurance companies were available because she was depending too much on us to just tell her. And so at that moment we thought, you know what, this is a Google opportunity. Just go find what companies are available and then we will go through the details with you. And so it was to just set her up so that she can at least initiate the process. And what I liked about that is we were there with her, right? But we didn't do it for her. So we were kind of there in the background. It was like the swimmer. We were close enough where if she really did start to lose control or get totally lost, we could have just pushed her in the right direction. But she would be great. She actually did very well. Mistake number five, waiting too long. A lot of parents think they'll start money education when the kids are older. Older comes too quickly. Research shows money habits formed by age seven. If you're waiting until they're teenagers, you're playing catch up. We started too late with some things. We're still correcting, but we're not waiting anymore. So this is a perfect example because we've made some mistakes and we've been able to adjust and correct some things. And wouldn't you say that our little one Naomi has a much better understanding and command of money than the oldest one?

13:07 Esther Absolutely. A great example of that was yesterday she saw that the weather was warm and she decided she wanted to have a limited stand. It's about 59 degrees out here, but she saw an opportunity and she connected with her business partner, her older brother, and he took her to buy the supplies, set out there with her, and she even got her oldest sister and her friend to come out and buy from her. And that's something that she set up by herself. I was not part of that, but it was something she wanted to do. She had experience from last year and she knew all the tools necessary to set it up and be out there and get paid. And she made some money yesterday, which is incredible. I just thought it was going to be funny because the irony was that it was still cold outside, but for her it was warm enough for a lemonade stand. And her sign said, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Yep, when life gives you lemonade, no lemonade. Mistake number six, money as reward and punishment. Using money as the primary reward of punishment creates an unhealthy relationship. Behave and you get money, misbehave and you lose money. Money becomes emotionally charged. It becomes about approval rather than about management. We're trying to keep money conversations separate from behavior management. They're related but different. So we're certainly not saying that you can't pay your kids or you shouldn't pay your kids for doing good things. But don't tie it to the behavior, tie it to the value they produce. We do this all the time, right? We say even when the kids are having a disagreement together, there's often a price on what they might be arguing about, right? Like maybe it's computer time. And Naomi wants to be on the computer, when Gabe's on the computer. What we say, well, this is Gabe's time, but maybe he'll sell you back some of his time. This is all negotiable. He can pay you for that or you can pay him for that. We do the same thing with if we need favors for the kids or from the kids or we just need them to do something. There's a value to that and I'm really glad that we teach them to see value in their labor and ask for money for it. That's very interesting that you say that because for me growing up younger kids were there to be servants to the older kids and the adults. But yet in our household, we're completely changing that around where the younger kids, the kids in general, have a complete place at the table of decision making, which also helps with the teaching. And that's something that's completely different from how I grew up, but yet I recognize the value in it because these children will become adults one day and we cannot wait for them to become adults, for us to teach them these basic rules and things for survival. And success. Well we're very blessed because our kids do not come with a lot of behavior problems, but I think it's all part of one comprehensive culture that we built where we involve them in decision making. We listen to them, we talk to them, we teach them often. And money is part of that. It's not the only part. The money comes down to like we said their value, the value that they bring. But we talk a lot about our values and our faith. And so we don't have to deal with behavior issues too often. But when there are behavior issues, because they will always come up yet, money is not a leverage point there. This comes back to fundamentally we need to teach them our values, re-teach them our values and what our expectations for them are. Absolutely.

16:43 Esther So it's interesting that we're talking about this because you and I come from completely different backgrounds. It's not just what you see physically here, but I grew up, I was born in Nigeria and that culture is very traditional, it's very patriarchal. So your dad was just like, go sweet to Florida. Oh my dad didn't have to tell us that. We just knew. Everyone else told us. So I was one of the youngest kids in the house. Your dad was like the dawn. Commander. He never gave direct orders. But everyone just knew what needed to be done. And it's still the case right now. So coming from that cultural background and raising children with you in this completely different culture, we've had to blend a lot of the good things that you have from your culture and a lot of the good things that I have from my culture and others for us to create this sort of traditional thing for us now. So we see that this is working for us. Yeah. It's a balance to strike because on one hand, what you're talking about is children just being forced to provide domestic labor in the house. I didn't say it. No, I'm skinny. You know, not like it's not back breaking stuff. I've seen it, right? But you're like, you're expected, the kids are expected to sweep or to clean and it's not a negotiation. They don't have a say in it. There's not a whole lot of engagement there. It's just they're told what to do. And it's a little gender bias. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's interesting too that we could talk about. Yes, we're the female in the household. There's types of work that only girls can do and only boys can do. Yeah. Yeah, I see that like when we visit your aunts and uncles, we totally see that. There's stuff that your aunt would never ask me or the boys to do, but they would readily expect you and the girls to do. So that's really interesting. But I think my background, people who grew up like me, I think make a similar mistake in the opposite direction. They don't expect their kids to work hard. They feel like I think a lot of families feel like it's their job to make their kids' lives as comfortable as possible. And we certainly have not gone that far. We don't mind it if our kids are uncomfortable or have to work. So like, you know, you talk about the gendered roles, we make our kids rotate their chores and the boys have to clean the toilets from time to time. And to me, I always thought like if that's one skill they can go out on their own, having acquired, I will have done them a favor. Just having a clean toilet will contribute a lot to your lifelong happiness in my opinion. Just so you know, it also contributes to your wife's life happiness because I appreciate the fact that she's cleaning the bathroom. Clean toilets have a lot of ROI. Yes it does. But yeah, that blending I think is good because we're teaching our kids that work is good, you should not be afraid of work. And when work is assigned to you, you have a responsibility to do it.

19:46 Esther But you also have, you're also contributing in such a way that it deserves some type of compensation. Absolutely. And I think what I also enjoy, especially in our household, is the fact that we were to rotate chores so that no one ever feels like, oh, when I was young, my job was to always do the dishes and I hated it. And then they grow up to adults that don't like doing dishes. But every person in the household has done some sort of dishes or taken out the garbage and they all rotate the bathroom cleanup. So that balance is something that I appreciate because it takes away from the tradition and I grew up in where women or females were expected to do certain things. And then the boys just did something else which I don't think benefits them as they grew up. And it could be like the stuff that the boys tended to do wasn't noticed as much so they could get away with not doing it. If your job is to do the dishes in our house, that's like the bottleneck job. Things can grind to a halt if there are not clean dishes or if dishes aren't put away or if there's dishes all in the sink. So that is an important job and we do rotate people through it. And one thing I've noticed is for a while the kids were comfortable. Our oldest actually enjoyed doing dishes and he did not want to rotate off of it even though he had the hardest job, the job with the most pressure on him. But we forced the rotation because partly because just out of fairness, but another thing is the idea of empathy. Like the other kids need to understand how hard each other works. So it's easy to say if Joseph likes dishes, it's easy to say if you're one of the other kids, oh, he's not working that hard. You go do that job and you'll know exactly how hard he's working. And they're all kind of different, right? This is what I love about running a household chores system and really relying on the kids. I know some families, they'll have the kids do it and then the parents will just go redo it so it's right. That's not what we do, right? We demand some responsibility and we inspect and we make them go redo it if it's not good enough. One thing I like about our system too is the chores all require different skills that are transferable into the workplace, right? Like the dishes have to get done. That's just a no fail thing. It has to get done at least once a day before dinner. So if you're in a village, that doesn't have to get done at a certain time but it does have a weekly schedule. So there's different aspects to these chores that are teaching them little micro lessons that will accumulate and help them be more dependable in the future. And that's why we call it life skills. That's right. Life in Nigeria was very different. The expectations for girls. But even then I can say this, yes, life in Nigeria was different. There were gender biases. But what we had in my household was we had a lot of help. We had a cook, we had a maid, we had drivers. So it kind of took away from the everyday work that our kids are probably experiencing and that we experience. So that has been very different. So we're now blending those things that I learned from back home and then now doing it myself with you, with our children. So that's very different but I'm glad that we are coming together and blending it to work for us. When you, but you had a culture shock when you moved to the United States, right?

23:18 Esther Absolutely. Because you transplanted. I also wonder why was he punished. You transplanted into a Nigerian American household where all of a sudden you were the house help, right? Yep. You know, what lessons did you learn from that that you are now trying to teach our kids, like making sure that maybe you don't make some of those mistakes or you don't want them to have some of that baggage that comes with being perceived as the help? For one, I don't want our kids not to be able to do things for themselves. They need to have independence. I think in Nigeria, yes, we had help. But I was also a member of the second wife. So a lot of my oldest siblings pushed on chores to us. And then I, for some reason, enjoyed being around the cook, the maids, because I love the way that they did things. I love the way the cook, the way that he prepared food. And I got to learn from him how to cook. And then the maids, how they cleaned, there was just something fascinating that I was fascinated by. And that's probably why when I moved here, I didn't see my status as going from, you know, the, the rich man's kid to being a maid. Frankly, I didn't even know that I was a maid in the US until I was like maybe 19 when my cousin literally told me that. And it was just like an eye opening moment for me because it was just like, oh, that's what I have been. But I was so naive and I was so in love with helping people and keeping things clean that it never occurred to me. So the lesson that I learned from that is it is not a bad thing to know how to clean. It is not a bad thing to know how to be independent. It's not a bad thing for you to drive yourself around. It is not a bad thing for you to also be a businesswoman. So what I want to do is to help our children be a full picture of those things so that I mean, I've had two different worlds, right? But now I'm creating my own and I'm sharing that with my children because I want them to be independent, but I also want them to know how to clean their own bathroom because maybe they won't have maids when they, you know, get older. Maybe they won't. But at least let them know how to do those things. And if they want to pay for it, that's fine. But at least know how to do the basics so that you're not just inundated with chaos and mess in your life because you can't do the basics for yourself. Your homework this week is a mistake audit. Look at this list and honestly assess which of these have you done? No judgment. We've all done all of them to some degree. The point here is awareness. Then pick one to correct this month. Not all of them, just one. All progress is still progress. Mistake number one. Silence. Mistake number two. Inconsistency. Mistake number three. Rescue. Number four. Lectureing instead of involving. Mistake number five. Waiting too long.

26:13 Esther And mistake number six. Using money as a reward or punishment. We're not sharing our mistakes to feel bad about ourselves. We're sharing them because awareness is the first step to change. If you've made these mistakes, welcome to the club. The question is, what are you going to do differently starting now? Next week we're getting into one of our favorite topics. Real estate as a family wealth strategy. How do you teach kids about property? How do you involve them in real estate decisions? And why is real estate such a powerful generational wealth tool? Until then, audit your mistakes and start your correction. Legacy isn't accidental. It's built on purpose. The content shared on the Broker's Table. Legacy at the Table podcast is intended for educational and informational purposes only. While we discuss principles, strategies and real life experiences related to finance, family and faith, watching or listening to this content will not make you rich or guarantee immediate financial success. True growth and lasting results require consistent effort, discipline and wise application. Of the knowledge gained, the insights provided are meant to guide, inspire and equip you to make better decisions over time. Not to serve as quick fixes or promises of instant wealth. We encourage viewers to thoughtfully apply what they learn in ways that align with their personal circumstances, values and long term goals.