CICC’s Founder and Executive Director Dr. Kerby T. Alvy is in the process of writing an expanded version of his acclaimed guide for parents, The Power of Positive Parenting: 11 Guidelines for Raising Healthy and Confident Children. He is including a new guideline to orient parents to become financial mentors for their children.

Here is a preview of what will be found in the new Power of Positive Parenting.

Guideline 12: Teach Your Children to be Financially Successful and Giving.

When you model and teach wise money management, your children have a better chance of becoming financially successful. When you also share with them that you give money to charities, to causes, and to disaster relief, you show them that money can be used for humanitarian as well as personal purposes.

Here are some specific things you can do:

• Begin early in teaching your children the value of money.

• Use four piggy banks in which your children can keep their money – one bank for monies they will spend for themselves, one for saving, one for investing, and one for the money they will give to charities, causes and disaster relief.

• Teach them about saving and interest.

• Teach them about investments.

• Teach them about charities and causes they can support and about other ways they can use their money for humanitarian purposes.

• Have your children earn their allowance.

• Teach them how to generate other sources of money.

• Discuss the purchases your children want to make with their money and help them make wise decisions.

• Give and read books on financial literacy to children.

• Give and play games with your children about financial literacy.

• Orient them to financial literacy websites for children.

• Draw their attention to your own budgeting, checking, credit card, saving, investing and giving activities.

• Involve your children as your assistants in managing household finances, saving, investing and giving.

Dr. Alvy then provides more detailed advice on how to carry out some of these recommendations:

The 10/10/10/70 Concept

It is very important to give children some guidance about how they might use whatever monies they earn now and in the future. An idea that those in the new field of financial literacy for children have suggested for helping children build wealth and control their financial destinies is - for every dollar they earn, have children:

GIVE - 10% to a charity of their choice

INVEST – 10% to build their fortunes

SAVE – 10% for the future, and

SPEND – 70% for everyday expenses.

This basic concept can begin to be taught to your children very early in life by getting them separate piggy banks for each purpose, as mentioned above. With whatever dollars they earn, distribute the coins into different banks as the 10/10/10/70 ratio indicates.