Family Money Values and Your Kids-Part Two - Excerpt from Raising Financially Fit Kids

By Joline Godfrey

It's one thing to talk about family values and quite another to talk about the financial values held by individual members of the family. Pretending that everyone is on the same page with their values isn't enough.

If we look at one money issue, such as Earning, we may see that Mom thinks earning lots of money isn't as important as being happy while Dad may equate happiness with lots of dough. On the same issue, the Daughter may see working as interfering with her social life while the Son may want to work every weekend and after school.

It just isn't likely that you'll be able to get all your family members on the same page in terms of values. But in the interest of being consistent money mentors with your kids, it does make sense to try to reach some kind of financial d?nte. Ivan Lansberg, author of Succeeding Generations: Realizing the Dream of Families in Business, describes the notion of a "Shared Dream" or vision that effectively helps galvanize family energy and excitement in the shepherding and growth of family wealth. Setting financial expectations is a lot easier when kids and parents are in accord in terms of a family vision: where will the family be in twenty years? What are the family's aspirations and hopes? Once the family vision has been articulated, the next step is to establish some clear values that your kids can use as financial lighthouses throughout their apprenticeship -- and 5-to-8-year-olds are not too young to benefit.

To help clarify your values, create a chart that lists you and your spouse and your responses to such money issues as Earning, Spending, Investing, Saving, and Philanthropy. You and your spouse should first try filling it in separately. Share it with any other family members who are central to the financial life of the family. Use the following list of values descriptors to help trigger your thinking about your values. Then discuss the results.

Some Values Descriptors

Power, Independence, Status, Peace, Generosity, Quest for knowledge, Desire for family, Community- building, Social justice, Love, Conservation

Another approach to figuring out your financial family values is storytelling: think of a story from your life about each of the money issues -- Earning, Spending, Investing, Saving, and Philanthropy -- and analyze it to determine what values you hold about that aspect of money.
Now ask each member of your family to do the same. If your kids are young (under 12), turn this into an oral storytelling session. As you share your stories, both conflicting and shared visions about money will emerge.

Getting values aligned among family members will go a long way toward ending family dramas related to money. Kids learn very early how to exploit parents' uncertainties and conflicting points of view. As a parent you have the authoritarian right to impose a decree: we will have a set of values we live by as a family unit. Here are a couple tactics to help you build consensus on values:

1. Create a family chart, collage, or graffiti poster.

Use any tool you can for helping family members articulate in some visual way the family vision and money values that are relevant to a family unit (as distinct from individual needs or desires). Little kids, especially, love making wall-sized murals. Put up giant sheets of paper with the words saving, spending, and sharing written in big letters. Ask your kids to draw an idea of what each word means. Then add the word future and have them do the same. The future is a pretty abstract concept for young ones. But having their moms or dads talk about the future is one way to give them a sense of what it actually means.

2. Don't try to take on too much.

Try to locate one value at a time that will work for the whole family. For example: if giving back is an imperative that you hope your kids will adopt, make that a priority value to embody, model, reinforce, talk about, and act on. Or if taking time together as a family is a tradition you want to maintain, create a vacation savings pot and ask each family member to donate 1 percent of any money earned each month ($.03 if you make $2.50 stuffing envelopes for Mom this month; $50 if you make $5,000). The point here is to find common goals and vehicles for making your family's life values operational.

There is no one-size-fits-all path to clarifying your money values as a family. Every family has its own set of issues and needs. A single dad and his 6-year-old daughter will have different challenges than a two-parent family with five kids, two incomes, and a significant trust fund. But both families may share the same fundamental values -- and that's the key: working hard to get your family money values in sync will go a long way toward helping you raise a family whose members are conscious and careful about how they spend, earn, save, invest and give money away.

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.