Flipping the Script: Turning Kids’ Internet Use into Positive Learning

I heard a wise person once say, “You can always take away innocence, but you can never add it back once it's gone.” This quote has lingered in my mind since I first read it. As a parent of young children, I know the internet can be a scary place. It’s full of stuff that might not be so great for them to see or stumble upon, and it exposes them to thoughts and ideas well beyond their means. As kids get older, they never seem to return to younger-aged things, so why speed up the process? Giving children access to the internet is a slippery slope with so many different viewpoints. It’s an extremely controversial topic and one that resonates with me as I navigate raising kids today. And while it would be extremely easy to focus on all the negatives, I think with how our world is today, it’d be more valuable to focus on the positives. 

Growing up, and at an early age, I was taught about the concept of money. I remember going to the bank and opening a savings account to save my chore money when I was a little girl. As I got a little older, I was taught how to split the money I made—whether from chores, jobs, or birthday gifts—into spending and saving. This eventually led to a lifetime career in finance and independently purchasing my first home at 24. When I became a mom, I knew I had to teach my kids some of those life lessons better than I had learned: the overachiever in me! 

When my daughters turned nine, I started entertaining the thought of taking them to open a savings account and quickly realized how archaic that was of me. I started asking around and doing my own research. I hoped to find an app that checked all my boxes on what I thought was important for my children to learn: saving, spending, and even dabbling into the concept of investing, but in a fun way! I chose Greenlight, a third-party app that is not affiliated with KWB Wealth. There are several apps and services available out there that teach your kids these fundamentals and more. I wanted to highlight some of the key features that I came across that might be of interest to anyone in the same boat as me. I encourage you to do your own due diligence because what worked for me might not work for you. Regardless, there are some really neat tools out there to help your kids learn about money!

Savings

Some apps give you the ability, and with help, if you need ideas, to create a chore checklist. Who doesn’t love a good list?! You can set these chores to repeat or assign them as one-time tasks. Kids can log in and see their list weekly, track their performance, and mark complete when they’ve finished something you’ve assigned. The thrill! Parents can tie their kid's allowance to finishing their chores or set up a payment as frequently as they want. And the best part is that you can set it up to pay automatically, so you don’t even have to think about it. If you have an older child who's earning money elsewhere, they can set up their direct deposits to this savings account, allowing you two to manage it together.

Another cool feature I came across is helping your child separate the money they earn into different buckets…such as saving 60% and spending 40%. In our household, this led to the question of what savings is. I explained it as taking some of their hard-earned money, and instead of spending it all right away, they put some aside to use later. This could be as simple as saving for a day trip to Disneyland or a new skateboard; you can make it as easy as you want. Whatever the ‘item’ may be, it’s delayed gratification and teaches them that saving money gets them one step closer to that big goal. The silver lining in this all is once they reach one of their goals, they feel so proud and are generally eager to do it again.

My primary objective was to help my kids understand that earning money takes work and isn’t just handed out. Often, it’s hard to get kids to do certain things, like brushing their teeth or eating vegetables, but if you turn it into a fun challenge, it becomes something exciting to work at. Soon after, we sat down and wrote a list of goals, aka “shopping must-haves,” and figured out how much money we needed to save every week to make it happen. This is really where the motivation happened, and just like that, we were off to the races…I’ve never seen my house so clean! 

Spending

By far, one of the coolest features I read about is the ability for your child to have a debit card issued to them by Greenlight, which is FDIC-insured up to $250,000 and has fraud protection with Mastercard's Zero Liability Program. Parents can block spending at certain stores or categories, receive real-time notifications when their child buys something, turn the card off at a certain time of day, and set spending limits. On the child’s end, they will see how much money they have and any limits on what they can spend. I think this is so amazing; it gives the child creativity, responsibility, and independence. 

Investing

I can’t vouch for this as my kids are far too young to introduce investing, but we will look into it as their savings grow. Many apps offer educational games to teach kids the basics of spending, investing, giving, and saving. Animated videos are assimilated like a game with a small Q&A, and if the child scores correctly, they get to move up to the next level. Some games allow the child to create a mock portfolio, much like the game “The Oregon Trail” that some of us played in school growing up. There are so many possibilities out there, and it's a fun way to introduce a more challenging concept to our children.   

In conclusion, my goal with this blog is to shed some light on the darkness of the internet. The world today is an uncertain one, and while we can’t control everything, we can control some of what our kids have access to. The basic concepts of saving, spending, and investing aren’t taught widely in our school system, and it’s up to us as parents to set a good example and give them the tools they need to succeed.  The internet and apps like Greenlight, a third-party app that is not affiliated with KWB Wealth, can be great ways to help our kids get ready for the future and this goes to show you that we can indeed flip the script.  

~ KWB Team