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When It Comes to Personal Finance, Teens Aren’t Making the Grade
By JLP | April 25, 2006
Eileen Ambrose of the Baltimore Sun highlighted the results from a Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy personal finance test that was given to 5,775 high school teenagers. The average score was 52.4%! That’s HORRIBLE.
The really troubling thing is that the kids that actually had a personal finance class did worse than those who did not. It must have been a boring class! I take this to mean that it is up to parents to teach their kids money skills. The problem there is that a lot of parents don’t know enough themselves.
It looks like we (personal finance bloggers) have our work cut out for us.
Topics: Kids and Money | 2 Comments »
April 25th, 2006 at 8:53 am
Of course it’s up to parents … too many parents use schools as an excuse to abdicate their basic parental responsibilities. And not just when it comes to money matters …
In fact, there are many things I don’t want schools to teach my kids. Has reducing the basics like literature, arithmetic and bare-facts geography and history made our kids more competitive compared to other post-industrial societies? Less likely to get in trouble?
While I’m going off on this tangent … my innocent 5 year-old was last year introduced to sensitive subjects in which I as a parent should have a say in terms of when and how to educate.
Back to the subject, I think if we stop giving parents the excuse to abdicate their parental responsibilities, maybe they’ll pay more attention to raising their kids. Of course, this won’t happen, as the momentum is overwhelmingly in the other direction.
August 14th, 2006 at 1:06 pm
If I only knew now what I knew then……. Know one ever told me that starting at age 25 if I saved $65 a month by age 65 I’d have a million dollars. And know one ever really taught me the importance or the principle of savings. Really, if I had to choose what my parents taught me about money—how to save it, how to make it or how to spend it—I’d probably have to say, what they taught me the most is how to spend money.
For many preteens and teens today, although bright, educated and smart, they fail when it comes to basic, simple money management skills. 4 out of 5 teenagers can not tell you what goes on inside a bank. And 73% didn’t know that a stock would yield more over time than a savings account, according to Jump $tart. Why? Because finance and money management are not being taught in schools or is just now starting to be taught in certain areas of the country in high schools. Plus, high schools are experiencing the largest dropout rate in their history—1 dropout every 7 seconds or 1 million drop outs in 2005. Plus, a minimum wage increase has just been turned down and wage stagnation is at its worst in 30 years.
If you don’t take the time to teach your children the principles of money NO ONE ELSE WILL! MoneyMoney101 for preteens and teens is coming! Stay tuned.