What if understanding money wasn’t just about numbers, but about knowing yourself? About understanding your emotions, your habits, your stories—and how they shape every financial decision you make?
The Money & Me curriculum for children aged 7 to 14 reveals a powerful truth: financial literacy isn’t just a life skill—it’s a lens into our identity, our values, and our relationships. This is not just about raising financially savvy kids. It’s about equipping the next generation (and ourselves) with the emotional and cognitive tools to make money mean something more than just transactions.
Money as a Mirror
When children are asked to draw their “money world,” they don’t sketch banknotes or calculators. They draw feelings—hope, stress, joy, pride. They capture memories of parents paying bills, moments of giving, times they had to go without. These are emotional imprints, not just financial ones.
Knowing what money means to us begins with becoming aware of how it shows up in our lives: in our body language, in our beliefs, and in our behaviors. The earlier we understand this, the more intentional we become about what we carry forward—and what we choose to leave behind.
The Science of Readiness
Children’s brains develop from the bottom up, and from the back to the front. Emotion centers activate early, while the logic and planning centers mature last. That means before children can plan a budget, they must first learn to manage disappointment, recognize desire, and reflect on decisions.
Knowing this changes everything. It reframes financial missteps not as failures, but as developmental steps. It explains why some kids struggle with saving—and why shaming them is counterproductive. It validates coaching over correcting, listening over lecturing.
Decision-Making as a Life Skill
In Money & Me, children learn to identify needs versus wants, track emotional triggers, and reflect on how spending or saving made them feel. These aren’t just “nice-to-have” skills. They are the foundation of responsible decision-making.
And the truth is, adults often didn’t learn this either. Many of us were taught that money talk was taboo, or tied our self-worth to how much we earned. Unpacking those beliefs helps not only the next generation, but us as well.
Because knowing how to manage money is important. But knowing how we feel about it—why we crave, why we avoid, why we give or hoard—is where wisdom begins.
Gratitude, Giving, and Growth
One of the final lessons in the curriculum centers on giving. Children are asked to recall a moment when they gave something—money, time, a toy—and how it made them feel. The reflections are profound. They don’t just learn the mechanics of giving—they understand its meaning.
Gratitude pages shift focus from scarcity to sufficiency. Family giving challenges create shared values. And for parents, these moments are a rare opportunity to model vulnerability, generosity, and emotional clarity.
Knowing how to give is not about wealth. It’s about empathy. And empathy is the currency of a connected life.
Why This Kind of Knowing Matters
In the end, Money & Me isn’t just about kids learning to manage their money—it’s about families learning to understand themselves. It’s about building self-awareness, emotional literacy, and a sense of agency around one of life’s most charged topics.
Because when we know how we feel about money, we start to recognize its power—and its limits.
And when children grow up knowing that their feelings, choices, and values matter in financial decisions, they don’t just become good with money. They become good at life.