Raising smart shoppers

The Money Heroes podcast from Young Money, supported by HSBC UK. Hello and welcome to the latest episode of The Money Heroes podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Hart. In this series, we aim to empower both parents and children to help develop their financial knowledge and skills, and along with an array of brilliant experts, we'll hopefully demystify the world of money. As a parent myself, I'm really keen to get my kids to understand the value of money and how to appreciate it wisely, and I know how difficult it can be introducing any new topic to children, so this podcast is focused on doing just that. And thanks for all your feedback so far, it's been really interesting to hear your personal money and finance stories. Now in our previous episode, we focused on the time when children start to get more financially independent, and how to use the primary planning framework to navigate effective learning at home. I really hope you enjoyed our conversation with Helen Westwood, MoneyWise 2019 Financial Education Teacher of the Year, on how to build confidence in introducing activities around money to your children. Now in this episode, we have another fantastic guest, Emma Higgins, education consultant and parent to a four year old daughter, to discuss the value of interactive learning at home, as well as managing needs and wants and developing critical consumers, which is one of our themes from the planning frameworks. So if you didn't hear our last episode, the primary planning framework supports the planning and teaching of financial education by setting out the key themes of financial knowledge, skills and attitudes. Now before I welcome Emma, I'll be going into some depth about two of the planning framework themes, how to manage money, including the value of money and keep track of it, becoming a critical consumer, including choices about saving and spending and differentiating between needs and wants. Now in today's digital world, it can be easy to lose sight of the value of money, particularly as some children may no longer see you handling physical cash and struggle to understand the concept. It's so easy to spend money that we don't physically have in our pockets or purses but by giving children the opportunity to handle physical cash in everyday life, you're teaching them the responsibility of managing their money and forming healthy habits. Trying to tell your youngster that the new roller skates that they think they need are not affordable because we have to pay for a new school uniform is a bit of a tall order to say the least. Children have different approaches to how they handle money, so it's important your child learns what works best in your family. Now for instance, you can introduce them to learning about shopping on a budget. Perhaps during a visit to a supermarket you can give them £3 and allow them to purchase an item of their choice and let them know it can be anything within their given budget. So set the opportunity, take a step back, allow them to take the lead on spending money with your supervision and observe. Are they keen to spend the money? Do they choose something more within their budget? Do they wait for their change from the cashier? Are they counting how much change they've been given? These are all worthwhile questions to consider. Now using the same concept of giving your child a budget to spend on an item in the supermarket, you could perhaps give them even bigger responsibility like purchasing school stationery or ingredients for school meals for the week, show them that this is the amount of money we have to spend for this shop. Another approach you can take is teaching the three-jar system, a simple concept teaching responsibility around managing and tracking money visually. So set up spend, save and give jars and allow them to decide how much to allocate to each. The important factor in this is that they are physically seeing where the money is going and for an older age group you can do this with household bills. These opportunities allow children to grasp what money is worth and can contribute towards the development of their attitudes about saving and spending and prioritising needs and wants. These are lifelong skills vital for both children and adults to build a financially stable future. So once they begin to get a feel of how physical money actually works and its value, they'll become more critical with their choices, hopefully. The Money Heroes podcast, we're here to get you talking about money. So let's welcome Emma to talk to us about interactive learning with your children, developing smart shoppers from an early age and how to have a positive impact on your child's consumer behaviour. For 20 years, Emma has worked in various roles within education, supporting training providers, educating young people up to the age of 19, quality marking and authoring interactive material for educators and parents. Emma says she has a passion for enabling individuals to build resilience within themselves, their support network and their communities to achieve their aspirations and create opportunities. Emma thrives on learning and working with others and her own life journey has led to some interesting experiences. Listen to this. This includes meeting Serenal Fiennes to sitting and having a chat with Cherie Blair about why young people should have the chance to become enterprising, but her biggest success to date is being a parent to Pixie, who is four and has just recently started school. But being in education for so long, she thought she knew it all, but being a parent and being on the other side has given her a special kind of insight when thinking about supporting other parents to give learning experiences at home and parental engagement with schools. So welcome, Emma. Thank you very much for joining us today. Hi, Johnny. So how did you first become interested in financial education? Learning how to manage money is a very valuable skill. So when did your interest begin? So I think if I'm completely honest, I made some fairly bad financial decisions when I was a lot younger and I didn't realise the impact of what those financial decisions would have on my future. When I was about 20, I was able to work for an education charity and we initially started off by supporting young people to develop their career aspirations. And we very quickly realised that having excellent career aspirations links directly into financial education and actually enterprise skills. So when I became interested in financial education is when I realised that for young people to achieve their aspirations, they need to understand money and they need to understand how to make good decisions around money. More obviously, and sounds like it, you're very passionate about interactive learning, which Money Heroes encourages both in the classroom and at home. Tell us about the value of interactive learning. I think the simplistic answer to that is that it's about enabling young people to take ownership of their own learning experiences. It really gives them a level of responsibility about how to engage with their own kind of learning opportunities. The most important thing I believe is to have children's and young people's voice actually listen to the needs of what an individual wants to understand, maybe what they're already experiencing and it allows kind of a questioning skill that sometimes we don't have. Sometimes we don't have in classroom settings. So this means that if you encourage children and teachers and parents to be involved in interactive learning, it builds relationships, it builds conversational skills, it builds problem solving, it's so much bigger than just the actual content and the topic that the young person and the child is learning and it's everything else on top of that that gives them a wider opportunity for their future. And how can parents ensure that they're interacting with their child's learning? I think the biggest thing is to ask questions for those questions to be open and to really listen to what the child is responding back with. So many times you hear parents saying, "Oh, you know, I asked them when we're getting home from school about what they've done at school," and they always say, "Oh, I don't know or I can't remember," direct to those questions to be specific about, "Have you learnt something new today? What is that? To teach me and make it so that, again, it's that relationship, it's that conversation rather than you just constantly asking questions. The other side of it is talk about yourself, talk about your past, talk about decisions that you've made, talk about experiences that you've had because you can learn from that. And that's one of the things that I always say when I'm talking to teachers and helping to teach teachers to understand about how to engage with financial education is actually the biggest way to let a child learn is to talk about real life experiences that people have had. Indeed. So in this episode, we're focusing on developing smart shoppers from an early age and managing children's needs and wants. So I imagine you think it's really important that we start teaching children about becoming critical consumers and differentiating need and wants from a very early age. Yeah. I mean, the conversations that you have with any child is a lot of, "I want that, I want that." And very soon, I found it was interesting actually with Pixie, it changed from, "I want that, do I need that?" But there was no difference in the thing she was asking for. I've been there myself. So there was actually no difference to the thing that she was asking for, it's just that she understood that if she said need, it would have more of an urgency attached to it. And actually, I believe that's from the kind of level of education that she's been getting at her preschool setting and from the school, she's understanding the differences of when she asks for something. You know, I really liked your information in the introduction about kind of when you're taking children shopping, have those conversations. Do they understand about what is a priority? What is something extra? You know, we have conversations about Pixie's lunchbox. And that really helps because it gets her to understand that she can't have everything she wants in the lunchbox because actually then she won't have that for the next day. So although we don't talk about money as such, we do talk about the value of things. So I do, I totally agree that it's really important from an early age, I've battled for a very long time, Johnny, about to people that say, "Oh, well, they're too young. They don't understand." They absolutely do understand. They do understand that things cost money and they do understand what is the difference between a need and a want. You just have to spend a little bit of time to put it into their context. They're never too young, really, are they? No. I mean, my children love anything to do with coins or putting money in a slot. It's a fun game for them. So where does children's consumer behaviour and consumerism begin? I mean, we said you're never too young, obviously not at the age of six months, but is there a starting point or maybe there isn't, everybody's different, perhaps? Yeah, and I think it depends on people's personal circumstances, family life, does the child have a sibling, an older sibling, because of course they will learn from that and they will receive things. I do think it's very early, though, I think it's to the point of when they start to shop in experiences, when they see exchanges of goods for money or for cards. The other thing is that you find, as you said about children with coins, you find that they start to realise that their coins have a value. Initially, it's a plaything, isn't it? It's something that they touch, they feel, they put into a money box and it's great fun. And then you start playing shops and then you start exchanging, I mean, Pixie gives me wads of coins for something that she wants, but when you start having that conversation to say, well, I'd like this thing, how much is that? You know, it could be a million pounds, but it's the concept of saying, well, you need to exchange money for this item before you can have it. And so it is very early on that you start having those games and you might not realise that you're teaching your child financial education, because for a lot of people, they think, oh, financial education, it's got to be structured, it's got to have a worksheet, it's got to have an outcome. But actually, it's just about the actual flow of when a child is playing. That's the simplest way to teach a child about money. Yeah, indeed, Emma. Of course, one of the issues with talking about money to our children, and you just alluded to it before, is that every family is different. I mean, it is quite a sensitive topic, especially as some of their school friends may actually already have the latest gadgets while they don't. And you actually have to be quite careful, don't you? How you approach this topic at home. Yes. And I think my biggest piece of advice on this is don't hide anything. There is no point making your child nervous about having conversations about money because actually it is a sensitive topic, but everybody faces money struggles or money positives during their lifetime. And I think certainly the children that I've worked with previously and the teachers and the parents, you know, they worry about things because they think, oh, their child's going to go into school and have conversations about their family life. But actually, it's not about that. It's about building the child's confidence to be able to ask a question, not be scared to ask for something and to be able to understand the response. Because again, it's giving them responsibility, it's enabling them to see how better choices that they make, less pressure on their parents, will enable them to have kind of a nicer experience at home. So, for example, a child that refuses to eat a certain type of biscuit, do a taste test with them, do a fun activity, explain to them how it doesn't matter that it's not this particular branded biscuit that you don't want. It's actually about the taste of something because it gives them that value. You don't need to broach everything with a kind of a negative aspect. Give them positive experiences. You talked about the three jar exercise. That's a great way of getting children to recognise that even if you have only tiny amounts of money spare, you can still make a difference. Yeah, so how do we teach that value for money isn't necessarily about finding the cheapest offer? What tools might we use to work this out? Isn't that just down to experience? I think it is. I think it's down to needs and wants. I think it's down to what's available at the time. And I think it's also the factor that a child is enabled to make their decision that's relevant to them. It's about having a conversation with them to say, OK, so you want this item, but is this item actually going to do what you expect it to do? And almost give them those research skills, those questioning skills again that I've mentioned before to get them to say, well, yeah, OK, maybe it doesn't matter that it's not this branded item. Maybe it doesn't matter that it's not 50 pens when I could just have one pen that do exactly the same thing. And I think at this age, it's about the value of what it's going to do for them rather than the actual physical value of the amount of money. Because what they'll then realise is by asking some extra questions and doing some extra research, they will naturally find a potentially cheaper option. Now as I've mentioned before on previous podcast, I've got two young boys and a much older daughter, but the little ones, the five-year-old and the eight-year-old, they are constantly bombarded with ads, very creative ads that will be online or on what we used to call television. Remember that? So society's changing, isn't it? How can we develop smart shoppers from a young age bearing in mind this sort of thing that they are bombarded with? I just think it stems back again to that idea about needs and wants. And I guess the word that we probably haven't mentioned much, which is priorities, getting them to think about what is it, if they had to put it in the order of the things that they really want, if they had the options, where would they put that thing in the list? Again, this morning, I had a really interesting conversation with Pixie because she wanted something that had come up on an advert and she said, "Oh, can I put that on Santa's list?" Because this time of year is almost the perfect time of year to have those conversations with children because you can talk to them about, "Well, actually, think about what it is that you want. We have a small budget. You can have conversations about Father Christmas, Santa Claus." But the most important thing is about getting children to understand where their priorities lie because you can have activities. You can talk to them about, "Well, if you had this or this, what would you get the most enjoyment out of?" For example. Yeah. Very good advice. So we're coming to the end of our time, Emma. How do we engage children when teaching them about consumer values and shopping choices? Can you give us some real good bits of advice and some points that I'm just not going to forget when we end this conversation? I think that it stems back to what I was talking about right at the start of our conversation in that it's about listening to what a child is interested in. There is no point teaching a child about something that they're not going to engage with. So I always remember when I first started doing this role, that I had a conversation with a teacher who was really proud of themselves for teaching a lesson to a group of 10-year olds about how to buy a sofa on finance, and absolutely praise him for his efforts for designing this lesson, but I had to explain to him the fact that they just don't care about sofas. It's something that is just there in their lounge. They're not interested about that. However, had he have done something around mobile phones or something that they could aspire to have, even a car at that age, something that they know they're going to have in their future, it's got to be real life context relevant for the child that's in front of you. It's got to be something that you know your child is particularly interested in, and it's also got to be something that has an impact for them. So for example, if you were thinking about shopping choices and consumer values, what about getting them to do exactly what you said, a three jar or a savings diary, get them to work out how much they would need to save, how long it would take them to save to achieve their aim. Because actually, interestingly, children don't always like to have things immediately. They like to have that idea about working for something, you know how proud they are when they come home with a sticker from school to say that they've achieved X, Y and Z. You can do exactly the same thing, you know, you could do a savings activity where you give them a sticker each time they get to a pound, something really simple. So I do think there's real opportunities for children to be given their own chances to develop their own consumer values and shopping choices. But my most important piece of advice is don't push your own on the child. They should have the opportunity to develop their own kind of opinions about money. They should develop their own likes, their own dislikes, their own, their own wants and needs, I guess, because their society is different now as to what it was from when we were young. Absolutely. And you mentioned stickers. My boys absolutely love stickers. They're a really, really useful tool in explaining money. And I would certainly advise others to follow suit. So before we let you go, is there anything you'd like to add to support parents for developing money-smart children? I think it's just to say don't be afraid to have those conversations with your children. Don't be afraid to talk to them about the fact that you have to pay for water so they don't leave the tap running when they clean their teeth. And they need to switch their lights off because electricity costs money, you know, don't shy away from opening their eyes to how much life, daily life costs, but also give them the opportunity to learn about money in their own way and for them to still be children, but to really build their own resilience and their own responsibility around financial education. Emma, thank you so much for your time. Really interesting thoughts. It has been excellent speaking with you today. Thank you. Thank you for having me. And thank you to everyone listening to this Money Heroes podcast. This is our last episode until the new year. It really has been great demystifying the world of financial education with you and hearing from our experts. I hope that we've answered any questions that you may have, but don't forget if you have any further questions, please visit moneyheroes.org.uk or get in touch at [email protected]. Wishing you all the best over the festive season, and I look forward to speaking to you in the new year. The Money Heroes podcast from Young Money, supported by HSBC UK, available on your favourite podcast app. Please listen and subscribe.