We All Need Help, Especially Our Kids

“Get ready for a two-hour marathon of life advice from your parents.”

While making dinner for some friends and family last week, our neighbor’s 18-year-old daughter asked me what she should expect when she heads to college this month. That quote was my reaction.

I’ve done that college drive with my kids, and there was something about those hours leading up to the dorm drop-off that made me panic and decide to vomit out everything I forgot to tell them during the years they lived at home.

The following is a rough transcript of some of the things I recall saying on one of those drives:

“You’re a very smart person. Don’t let your roommates decide how you study. You create your own schedule and stick to it.”

“Also, make sure you are setting aside 30% of the money from your library job for taxes. You’ll want to make sure your direct deposit is set up. Do you remember how to fill out a W-4 Form? You’ll need to mark ‘EXEMPT.’ Remember that form?”

“Do NOT sign up for one of those credit cards where you get a free shirt.”

“Take all of the free food you can find.”

“Set aside time on Sundays to schedule out what you need to get done that week.”

“Don’t use the free Wi-Fi at Starbucks.”

Offering any sort of financial education thoughts or sharing your life’s wisdom shouldn’t happen on the drive to college – they aren’t listening. They are worried about opening that next, very large door to enter a new life. Also, they smell your fear and parental worry.

Kids are not stupid. They push back, they don’t do things how we did them and they typically can’t stand our music. But they are definitely not stupid. Those hormone-riddled brains are absorbing a lot of information beyond Instagram. Yet, as parents, as advisors and as guidance counselors for the next generation, many of us quite possibly wait until it’s too late to teach and prepare them for the bigger life events.

Let’s face it, after working all day, eating a bag of Doritos on the couch sounds a lot better than guiding your child through your thoughts on how they can create a better financial future – there’s a “Law & Order” marathon on for goodness sake.

Maybe it’s the older generations that are the lazy ones.

I’ve had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with my parents lately and I’ve asked my mom about how she tried teaching my sister, brother and me about money. Most of it revolved around empty tubs of Parkay margarine in 1973.

“I set out three tubs for each of you,” she said. “You each got a dollar every week for your allowance and one quarter went into the ‘Church’ tub, one quarter went into ‘Savings’ and two quarters went into ‘Spending.’”

That was all she could remember. She continued, “After that, I don’t know. Life got pretty messy shortly after that and we probably didn’t think of it again.”

I do remember those tubs very well; I kept arrowheads I’d find in them.

A lot of parents do actually try to teach their kids about finances, but I think either they didn’t really learn how to manage money or it simply wasn’t a priority, and they let the topic slip away into the busyness of life, work and family.

It’s like ignoring the check engine light in your car; if you don’t do anything about it, the car will shut down and you could crash or even get badly hurt.

I appreciate the work credit unions are trying to do to pick up the parenting and financial advice slack in schools around the country.

For instance, according to the League of Southeastern Credit Unions and Affiliates, its credit unions conducted 934 financial education presentations for students in Florida during the 2018 to 2019 school year, and another 112 similar presentations in Alabama. In all, LSCU stated that these presentations reached 70,857 students.

According to the stats provided by LSCU, the credit unions in those two states are recognizing the financial education need and nearly doubled the number of presentations in the last school year compared to the previous year’s numbers of 574 presentations in Florida and 76 in Alabama.

It’s definitely something, but is it enough? Or will it ever be enough even if credit unions in those areas do 6,000 presentations in one school year?

As credit union professionals, your credit union can provide all the students in the country all of the financial education tips from the CFPB’s “For Your Child During Middle School” PDF that you’d like. I’m just not convinced it will work.

Here is one bit of advice to engage middle schoolers in financial discussions from the CFPB’s handout: “Play board games that are based on financial, career and other life choices. Play online games with your children and talk about the decisions they made and what they learned. Talk with them about the electronic games they play, and ask about the points they acquire and how they decide to spend them or about the decisions they must make and how they make them.”

Yes, it’s better than nothing. But so are Doritos.

The advice is technically advice in a Wonder Bread kind of way. And, I think, what they do get right about it is treating the subject as important enough to have a one-on-one conversation about.

What LSCU’s credit unions are doing is planting that initial and very important seed. It’s like the Smokey Bear fire safety lessons we had in elementary school. We watched a film about fire safety and then the entire class received a plastic firefighter’s hat that we threw around on the playground later that day. The school janitors must have hated fire safety day.

I feel like financial education is more of a parenting issue/problem. The classroom presentations are definitely a good thing. But it’s the step beyond that that can make the real impact. I know what helped most with my kids was driving them to the credit union and sitting down with a financial expert to walk them (and me) through the steps of account management, budgeting and planning.

I’d like to know what credit unions are doing to literally walk kids and their parents into a branch to have a sit-down, all-inclusive discussion about finances. It’s not necessarily about selling the products and services of the credit union, because that will happen.

This issue of our younger generations’ financial future is important enough that I’d like to see a credit union version of a parent-teacher conference. This is about taking that next step to provide that credit-union-parenting that kids (and parents) desperately need.

Michael Ogden is editor-in-chief for CU Times. He can be reached at mogden@cutimes.com.