Outwitting the Money Monsters - Part Two - Excerpt from Raising Financially Fit Kids

By Joline Godfrey

This month, we'll take a look at Money Monster #3: Media & Marketing.

You’ve probably seen it at some point. The TV ad opens with a teenage boy sitting in front of his computer, in the middle of a bedroom littered with clothes and papers and CDs and dirty dishes. His mother stands in the doorway pleading with him to, “Clean up this room!” Ignoring her, the boy flips the cover off a bottle of Sprite. A gleam shows in his eyes as the camera zooms in on a point score printed inside the cap and the voiceover blasts musically into a celebration of RocketCash, delivering the boy from the tedium of his mother.

Rocket Cash was one of the first of the so-called near-currency companies. Originally conceived as a great way to create transactional income for dot coms, a number of companies pioneered on-line deposit accounts that parents can use to make on-line shopping easy for their kids. First billed as a means of teaching ‘money management to kids,’ and trying to sound high minded, these retailers paired up with the nation’s biggest retailers to find more hip ways to manage money right out of your pockets, using your kids as funnels.

Today, RocketCash offers a kind of frequent flyer reward system for buying things. Sprite, Nestle’s and over 100 other retailers offer RocketCash points as incentives for your kids to spend money on stuff. But in fairness to RocketCash, this is just one of literally thousands of messages (and vehicles) that offer ever more inventive invitations to your kids to spend and things to spend money on.

No parent has the resources to compete directly with the marketing budgets of Gap, Nike, Nintendo, and Revlon. And whether it’s the latest Austin Powers meets Micky D’s campaign, or a super action flick pumping out Eminem’s latest CD, imploring your kids ‘not to spend so much money’ is, for the most part, an act of futility in the face of such raw power. You can’t turn off the media—whether on billboards, in the school cafeteria, on the web or at the local fast food dive, buy me, buy me messages prevail.

You can equip kids to think for themselves about the messages coming at them. The most media savvy generation in history, these kids do not buy every thing they hear. But they do need a clear set of values to power the internal compass they will use to make their own decisions about what’s hot and what’s not; what they need and what they don’t. Think of these values as a kind of psychic armor your kids can use to defend themselves against the manipulations of the media.

Joline Godfrey is an internationally recognized author, speaker, and mentor, leading the movement to increase financial literacy and empowerment in young people. Her most recent book is Raising Financially Fit Kids. Ms. Godfrey has been featured on Oprah, NBC's Today Show, the CBS Early Show, Lifetime Television, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, Fortune, etc. Independent Means Inc. is the nation's leading provider of financial education programs, summer camps, products, and online subscription services.