This guest post is from Jackie, who writes at MoneyCrush about learning to love your financial life and reaching goals. Check out her site at www.moneycrush.com or subscribe in a reader
Grocery shopping with young kids can be an ordeal. When my son was a little boy, like most toddlers he’d sit in the grocery cart and point out the things he wanted. At first I said no, over and over again. It got to be frustrating for both of us.
After all, who wants to say no to their kid all the time? I sure didn’t. And who wants to hear no all of the time? Certainly not a toddler!
I don’t know what changed, but one day I’d had enough, so I said yes. To every single thing he wanted.
I didn’t end up with an entire cartload of stuff, because there was a catch. My yes went something like this: “Sure sweetie, you can get whatever you want, but just one thing. You pick what you want.”
If he wanted a box of cereal, OK. Chocolate milk? Fine. Frosting? Sure. Cookies? No problem. He heard a whole bunch of yesses — or rather, “yes, if that’s your one thing.”
At first we went through a lot of different items before reaching the checkout. Sometimes he’d literally sit and look between one item and the other before picking one. But as time went on the decisions got easier and easier for him. (Now that he’s a teenager he just puts his one thing on the list and I pick it up for him.)
This inadvertently turned out to be a good way to teach my son about the value of money: It’s not unlimited, but it can be used to get the things you want. It also helped with teaching about delayed gratification and prioritizing.
Plus it made trips to the grocery store a lot more pleasant.
Kelly’s comments: I found myself nodding along as I read this post. We do this with our kids as often as possible. It turns a negative thing (a case of the “I-wants,” into a positive. It’s also a fantastic way to teach your children limits, and how to choose what you value, a very important concept in personal finance.
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