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Zusatztext "This is a terrific little book that could completely change the way many parents think about children and money." -- Publishers Weekly Informationen zum Autor David Owen plays in a weekly foursome, takes mulligans off the first tee, practices intermittently at best, wore a copper wristband because Steve Ballesteros said so, and struggles for consistency even though his swing is consistent -- just mediocre. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker, a contributing editor to Golf Digest, and a frequent contributor to The Atlantic Monthly. His other books include The First National Bank of Dad, The Chosen One, The Making of the Masters, and My Usual Game. He lives in Washington, Connecticut. Klappentext Owen explains how to give children real experience with all kinds of investments, how to foster their charitable instincts, how to make them more helpful around the house, how to set their allowances, and how to help them acquire a sense of value that goes far beyond money. Chapter One: Children and Money: An Introduction When our son was born, my wife and I needed a baby blanket for his crib. Our daughter, who was three and a half, had several old ones in her closet. "What are you doing in my closet?" she demanded. "Just getting one of these old blankets," my wife said. "Why?" "To give it to your new baby brother." "I want it!" our daughter screamed. "But, honey," I said, "you didn't even know that old blanket was there." "I need it!" "It's a baby blanket. Don't you want to give it to a baby?" "I want it!" My wife and I looked at each other in despair. What to do? Suddenly, my wife had an inspiration. "Would you take five bucks for it?" she asked. (No more crying.) "O.K." Money is a handy tool if you use it wisely. Even very young children get the hang of it in a hurry. In the baby-blanket incident just described, my wife narrowly averted a family crisis by offering to swap an emotionally neutral symbol (money) for an emotionally loaded one (the old blanket). With a crisp five-dollar bill in her piggy bank, our daughter felt justly compensated for this latest unpleasant ramification of the birth of her baby brother. And my wife and I were delighted to give her the cash, because doing so let us go back to what we had been doing before the argument arose: changing diapers, ignoring laundry, and not getting enough sleep. If my wife hadn't suddenly thought of monetary compensation, our fight would have escalated along a predictable trajectory: my wife and I would have stepped up our efforts to make our daughter feel like a bad child, and our daughter would have stepped up her efforts to make us feel like bad parents. Instead, everyone went to bed that night in a pretty good mood. A couple of months later, our daughter even reconciled herself to the idea of no longer being an only child. Walking alongside her brother's stroller, she said suddenly, with a sigh of resignation, "I don't know who I'll marry. Him, I guess." GROWN-UPS ARE DUMB Money is so easy to understand in theory that you'd think more people would do a good job of handling it in practice. But they don't. In many families, financial matters become a psychological theater of war not only between parents and children but also between parents and parents. Why does that happen? We probably don't want to know the real reasons. (One family's story: I claim to think money is pure pragmatism, while my wife believes it's all symbolism and neurosis.) But there are ways of sidestepping the problem altogether, especially where children are concerned -- as long as parents take advantage of human nature instead of ignoring it or futilely attempting to change it. Most efforts by most parents to teach most kids about money are doomed from t...
