Ways to Monitor and Guide Your Child’s Spending Habits

As a parent, you’ll need to teach your kids various things in life, from the basics such as what things are dangerous or bad and to steer away from, all the way to finances and spending. Some lessons are easy to teach, but others may be seen as boring and be far harder to get them to listen and understand. All of these are normal things in parenthood and you shouldn’t be discouraged. That’s why we’ve made this handy guide that will hopefully help you understand what you can do to help your child learn healthy spending habits.

Communication is key

The main way that you can monitor what your child is doing with their money is through good communication. If you create an environment of trust and understanding then they will likely be open and tell you about everything, even if they made a mistake. This is not only important for this specific situation but in general, should be something you are aiming for. It will greatly help their mental health to know that they have the trust of their parents and your relationship with your kids will be massively improved.

Of course, even in a trusting environment, you should still have backups available and other ways that you can monitor what’s going on, but this is the healthiest thing that you can do and is incredibly important for any healthy parent-child relationship. We can say with certainty that if you manage to create a space filled with trust in your home that everything will be easier down the line than it would be otherwise, as the chance of your child hiding something from you in the first place will be far lower.

Kids cards

One of the most useful modern tools that can be used for parenting and specifically for teaching finances is debit cards for kids. They can massively help both with monitoring and guiding your kids when it comes to spending. An important aspect is that they give your children a sense of independence which psychologists say is incredibly important, especially with teens. It will massively improve their mental health while also still allowing you to keep them safe and monitor everything that’s going on.

They come with various apps and tools that allow you to keep an eye on everything, set daily limits, disallow spending on certain sites, and many more things. The level of control that you have is massive, but it also makes it so that the control is discrete so that your child doesn’t feel as if there is someone breathing down their neck all the time. It’s in our opinion the perfect combination of both worlds and when utilized properly is one of the most useful tools that parents can use today to teach their kids proper finances. 

Games are a great option

IIf your kids are still relatively young, then making up certain games and playing with them can also be an incredibly effective method of teaching them these various lessons. It takes a decent bit of creativity to come up with one, but we’re certain that, when utilized properly, it can very quickly teach your kids things that they otherwise may not be interested in due to finding them boring or not important. You can try games for kids on Sonsaur; it can be a great source of bonding, and it can be downloaded directly through the Google Play Store.

At the end of the day, it’s also great that you can teach your kids while still spending quality time with them and simply enjoying the fact that you can have a blast together. This method is great if for example you have a lot of work lately and are struggling to find enough time to both teach them everything that you think they should know and also play/spend time together. If you can’t find time for both then combining them together can make up for that in a great way.

Conclusion

It’s 2023 so parents have a large number of different options for teaching their kids life lessons, though choosing which one to use has become harder due to this fact. We recommend trying them all out and seeing what works best for your family as everyone is different and the same approach won’t work equally well with two different people. We wish you and your kids the best of luck.