Teaching kids about money

[Adam Naor]

Hi Parents:

I recently left Google to start a company to educate kids about money, and personal finance (how to earn, save, and think about money). I am opening the private beta to this Google group. If you are interested in obtaining access before the public release, please let me know. It works on any iOS device (iPad or iPhone) and is aimed at helping parents and their kids between ~5 and 16 years of age.

Thank you,

Adam Naor

Founder, Pennybox

[Davison]

Hi Adam,

Thank you for embarking on this journey. My son is 5yo, and I am intensely interested in having him learn money concepts. I question whether 5yo is too early to learn these concepts in concrete terms as my attempts to-date have not stuck, but ruefully admit that my parental teaching methods are most likely at fault.

Thus, I volunteer my son to be a beta tester, conditioned on him staying engaged with the app. In exchange I'm happy to provide feedback about his interactions with the app, difficulties encountered and other miscellaneous topics.

Thanks,

Davison

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[Adam Naor]

Thanks Davison, I will add you to the beta group here and send you the product in the very near future (hopefully next week!). Working around the clock to get this ready for parents and kids - I think you will love what we have built! There are different ways to teach kids about money and we are taking the approach of "learning by doing".

Cheers,

Adam Naor

[Zdravko Smilevski]

hi adam, 

my daughter, who is eight, would probably be interested in this. please count us in.

best,

z

[Robin Lee Powell]

On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 12:22:06AM -0500, Davison wrote:
> Hi Adam,
>
> Thank you for embarking on this journey. My son is 5yo, and I am
> intensely interested in having him learn money concepts. I
> question whether 5yo is too early to learn these concepts in
> concrete terms as my attempts to-date have not stuck,

We've been using a sticker chart where each sticker (given out,
typically, for getting ready quickly in the morning) is worth
various things including $5 towards anything they want to buy. A
treat that doesn't cost us anything (i.e. something sugary we
already have) costs half a sticker. We also allow them to go 1
sticker into debt on a purchase.

They've learned a ton, in particular the rudiments of fractional
arithmetic. We did not intend this. :)

It also means that when they, say, want to go to my mom's house I
can explain that a plane ticket to Toronto costs 100 stickers and
they get that that's a lot.

[Adam Naor]

Hi Robin,

Thanks for this additional context, much appreciated. We are getting lots of similar feedback from parents who want to teach money basics and then additional skills are learned (i.e. math, values, counting, etc.). The beta will be ready in ~2.5 weeks as I work through the final development. Lets stay in touch and very keen to get your feedback. My humble guess is that kids ~8-15 will get the most benefit but we might be in for a younger surprise!

Thanks for help and agreeing to join the beta, I hope you benefit from what I am building. 

[Dave Orr]

I'd be interested in checking it out as well. My kids are 7 and 9, and like many people here, pretty far outliers in terms of IQ and what they can grok about money and math. However, the real challenge is to balance short and long term rewards with spending versus saving, which is tricky and take time. Something that could help with that would be welcome.

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[Adam Naor]

Thanks Dave, I have added you to the beta group and will share a downloadable app as soon as I can. Thank you! 

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[Tom Adams]

Just want to note that there may be pitfalls to using the family environment to teach some things about money,

Sticker charts may teach the wrong things about money.  Same goes for allowances.

Kids should learn about communal environments.  Sticker charts and allowances tend to turn the family home into more of a non-communal environment, whereas the family should probably be a place where kids learn the value of communalism, sharing, mutual support.

I think the best way to learn about money is to get a job.  Babysit or mow the neighbor's lawn for a fee.  That way you can get fired if you don't perform well.  In the home, somebody has to do the work whether they are paid or not.

Alan Kazdin, head of the Yale Parenting and Child Conduct Center, recommends that parents should optimize there ability to use social reinforcement.  They should rely on social reinforcement as much as possible.  Parents should react to good behavior by catching the kid doing good.

Kazdin's optimized method for catching a kid doing good: Include 5 elements: timing, enthusiasm, specificity, touch, pure positivity. React immediately to good behavior, be as enthusiastic as the kid can stand, include affectionate touch like a pat or high five, say specifically what you saw that was good (not just "good job"), don't caboose criticism on the end (no "but...")

You should apply this to the smallest thing, the smallest step in the right direction, good behavior that you might be overlooking or taking for granted.  Don't wait for perfection or complete success.  This is called behavior shaping where you build up a complex behavior in small steps.

But you can only catch a kid doing a behavior after they do it.  What if they never or too rarely do it?

Sticker charts are useful to get a behavior going.  You should also use social reinforcement when you use tangible reinforcement.  After the habit is well-established, fade out the sticker chart and fade the praise to occasional.  Random partial reinforcement is the best way to lock in a habit, constant reinforcement creates a brittle habit that goes away when the reinforcement ceases.

Even for something as mundane as taking out the trash for an allowance, there are plenty of good things to say to the kid who does it well.  It helps the familiy, it shows responsibility, dependability, and initiative.  Maybe some more.  It's helpful to write a little essay on why you value a behavior, this will help you come up with sincere talking points for social reinforcement.

[Gunnar Zarncke]

Hi Tom,

thank you for giving so comprehensive feedback regarding token system use and Kazdin's proven recommendations (the book is really great). 

While I agree on your observations in general I'd like to comment that differnt approches work on different children and real parent pragmatics often make it difficult to follow the recommendations to the letter. 

Over time I have used differnt token systems and phased them in and out. 

Phasing out for example isn't always easy esp. if the children like the reward they expect and demand it...

And then there is also some potential problem with praise I have been made aware of recently: It signals that you have the status or authority to decide what is good. This is also creating a kind of environment some might not want to foster too much.

Happy Sanity

Gunnar

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Betreff: Re: Teaching kids about money

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[Tom Adams]

Those are good points.  They need to be made in this context. I need to clarify what I mean.

On Sunday, March 19, 2017 at 7:40:21 PM UTC-4, Gunnar Zarncke wrote:

Hi Tom,

thank you for giving so comprehensive feedback regarding token system use and Kazdin's proven recommendations (the book is really great). 

While I agree on your observations in general I'd like to comment that differnt approches work on different children and real parent pragmatics often make it difficult to follow the recommendations to the letter. 

Over time I have used differnt token systems and phased them in and out. 

Phasing out for example isn't always easy esp. if the children like the reward they expect and demand it...

The kids may regress if you remove the tangible reward.  That is true.   I should not give the impression that fading a sticker chart is always going to work.   The suggestion is to try to minimize the use of tangible reinforcement with a preference toward using social reinforcement.

 

And then there is also some potential problem with praise I have been made aware of recently: It signals that you have the status or authority to decide what is good. This is also creating a kind of environment some might not want to foster too much.

Praise can have bad side effects, You should also minimize the use of social reinforcement.  As a general rule, don't use any kind of conditioning if you don't have a good reason to change your kid's behavior.

For instance, if you reinforce specific aspects of a kid's drawing, then you end up, to some extent, controlling what they draw.  Praise does not always function as reinforcement, but it is possible to inadvertently reinforce behavior even with mere attention. See here:

http://epicurusgarden.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-reinforcing-power-of-adult.html

PS: Signalling can have unexpected consequences, signalling should not be confused with reinforcement.  If a parent repeated reacts to a behavior by saying "I have the status and authority to decide that what you are doing is bad",  it's quite likely that they will reinforce the behavior (with the reward of attention) while signalling that they have status and authority to judge it bad.

 

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[Robin Lee Powell]

We started with the Kazdin method, and when mornings were nothing
but screaming fights, we got serious about sticker charts instead,
which turned everything around. It's impossible to tell whether
this was about retraining us to reinforce more consistently, or the
actual bribes, or something else entirely. *shrug*

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[Davison]

+1 for the Kazdin method. The sticker charts marked a turnaround point. 

We plan to use sticker charts for the younger one when she's old enough to put them on the chart herself on the fridge.

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[William Eden]

I agree there are bad ways to introduce money to the family environment. Hayek even warned about that. Basically I wouldn't want to start paying kids to do chores around the house. (I'm open to paying them if they contribute to a family business that earns a profit.)

We do give Lydia what amounts to an unconditional basic income, and I think it mostly gives her a lot of good lessons (it was very painful the first time she couldn't buy anything in the store, but she's 4.5 and already displays patience and explicit verbal saving behavior).

I think I naturally do the thing Kazdin describes and I think it works well for lots of things. My experience with similar systems though is that it doesn't work if you're doing it in a way that feels forced, and I think that's a very very common mistake. I basically think if your mental posture is to attempt to manipulate them, children are exquisitely sensitive and will detect this immediately.

Sent from my iPhone, enjoy the unusual brevity.

[Tom Adams]

>I basically think if your mental posture is to attempt to manipulate them, children are exquisitely sensitive and will detect this immediately. 

Could you translate that into language that would make it verifiable?

There is a boatload of evidence that unintentional operant conditioning works just as well as intentional operant conditioning.

The latter can't be called "manipulative" because it's unintentional. But the former is intentional and can be labeled "manipulative".

Kids respond to either.

There a various reasons why an attempt to change a kid's behavior will fail, it probably never fails merely because it is intentional.

Could be you are seeing some other phenomena and incorrectly attributing it to the detection of a mental posture.

[Tom Adams]

Actually, sticker charts are part of the Kazdin Method, so I don't understand the "instead".

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[Robin Lee Powell]

We haven't faded out the sticker chart, and aren't planning on it;
it's been far too helpful. When we let it fade for a while at one
point, things got really bad.

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[Tom Adams]

Don't fade it if it causes behavior to slide.

It might be a good idea to at least consider planning on fading at some point.  There is a chapter in Kazdin Method called "A Child's Wider World" that covers fading.

But, the arguments for fading might not be all that compelling to you.  Fading seems to be Kazdin's answer to the question "Do I have to do this forever?" posed

as an objection to the program.  But if you don't feel a need to stop, then that does not hold.    The other question is "What happens in the future when I

am not around to reward the kid?".  Kazdin's answer is that fading the reinforcement schedule to occasional tends to make a behavior resistent to change.  But parent's are

often solving short-term problem in home environment and care relatively little about the long run. Also, some problem behaviors don't persist anyway for whatever

reason.

PS: Rewards are not bribes unless your kid is a government official and you are rewarding the kid for an illegal favor.  It's interesting how we tend to use pejorative terms for

the elements of conditioning like "bribes" and "manipulation".  We use language that implies that these methods are inherently bad.  The notion of conditioning did not

exists before the 20th century.  Perhaps our ethical intuitions (forged at an earlier date) don't work too well for evaluating conditioning?

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[Tom Adams]

The screaming fight thing may be something called the Patterson Coercive Cycle.  It's an interesting dynamic:

https://www.pendletonpsych.com/doc/parent-child-coercive-cycle.pdf

Gerald Patterson originated Parent Management Training (PMT) at U of Oregon.   I suppose Kazdin improved it, Kazdin calls it Kazdin PMT.  There are a number of other similar programs that all get grouped to together under the name PMT,  they have similar origins and use similar methods.

On Wednesday, March 22, 2017 at 2:48:44 AM UTC-4, Robin Powell wrote:

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[Robin Lee Powell]

So interestingly, we've since started talking about fading the
sticker chart. They've started just ignoring it sometimes of late
and their behaviour is still pretty good (whereas say 4 months ago,
a week of ignoring the chart was a hell week for us, relatively
speaking).

Also they've started getting mad about the sticker chart itself, as
though without the sticker chart they'll get cookies every 5 minutes
or something (that is, they seem to believe we're more manipulable
without the chart, which was in fact part of the point as I'm a
softy :D ).

So we've thought about setting up something more like an allowance
and seeing how that goes.

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[Robin Lee Powell]

That's a good short version, thanks.

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[Tom Adams]

I was looking for something about fading and I ran across this:

http://www.appliedbehavioralstrategies.com/reinforcement-101.html

that link does not directly talk about transitioning from tangible reinforcement to social reinforcement, but it does talk about using a diversity of reinforcers.

I thought it might be good to see fading expressed in ABA-language rather than Kazdin's laymanese.

I your earlier post, I thought you might be confusing letting a sticker chart lapse with fading.  The fact that a sticker chart is hard to maintain is an argument in favor of fading.

One of the interesting things about behaviorism theory is that it contains the seeds of it own refutation.  If the environment is main thing that shapes behavior then the parent will never be able to instill long-term behavior patterns since they don't control the environment long-term.  Montrose Wolf came up with the idea of a "behavior trap" as a long-term thing but I don't think the idea got much attention.

Of course, short-term behavior shaping alone is pretty darn good thing in the 2-5 year range where the parent has a high level of control over the environment (assuming the parents have self-control).

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