THE great thing about children is that they do not have entrenched positions like most adults and are still fairly impressionable. They, therefore, provide a very fertile group for planting ideas and thoughts that can help them later in life.

I have a desire to bequeath to the generation coming after us better financial literacy and a much healthier relationship with money than we have had. I wish our children will develop a much more prudent financial lifestyle and will resist the temptation to be sucked early into a cycle of non essential debt.

I partly fulfill this vision practically by taking younger members of our communities through holiday financial literacy courses. During last holidays’ boot camp, I asked the students who attended if they knew how much their parents spend on their education. I got them to thumb suck what they thought their parents earnings were.

Nearly all were able to tell me what was spent in terms of school fees. I then helped them to figure out additional costs like cost of picking and dropping them at school, tuck-shop money, sports kit costs and other extracurricular activities. I then got them to express the total costs as a ratio to what they perceived to be their parents earnings, converted to a percentage.

The figures they gave me ranged from 10% to 45% which I got them to covert to time expressed in actual days their parents worked to cover their education expenses. I then sat down with my group to discuss with them the story these numbers were conveying.

The first obvious story was that none of their parents were in the same position as the local billionaire Patrice Motsepe. The second story was that the parents were making significant sacrifices just to ensure that they got an education. The idea was not to take them on a guilty trip but to get them to process the financial reality of the various situations they find themselves in. This then gives me a base to walk them through what money and income is; where it comes from and how to relate to it.

At the end of the course, a good number of the children expressed a desire to sulk less and stop nagging their parents for things they could not afford and were clearly not essential for their sustenance.

A lot of Zimbabweans in the Diaspora spend their end of year holidays back home. It is important when we are there that we do not just become Eurocentric and take you children to Chipangali Wildlife Orphanage. It is important to also take them to spend say a whole day volunteering at need places like Entembeni  or Zororo Old People's Home, Kapota School for the blind,  Danhiko Project,Manhinga Village, Old Mutare Orphanage, Jairos Jiri Centre, Chinyaradzo Children’s Home, Ekuphumuleni Geriatric Nursing Home or Mashambanzou.

This will help them to connect early with needy situations in their own country of birth which will help them to be socially relevant in their adult lives. It should also help us to debunk the mindset that our charities are the responsibility of old widows somewhere in the USA or in Europe.

Barack Obama once said, “focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself, which will leave you unfulfilled”. Teaching children to share is one way to ensure they don’t become too greedy and it loosens their obsession with money. Money in itself is not evil; it’s the love of money that can drive people up the evil path. It also helps to make them realise that no-one ever became poor by giving to the needy.

I was impressed when younger children in our community in South Africa collected about a hundred shoe boxes packed with toys, stationery and other academic stuff at the beginning of this month. They physically took it to children in semi-informal settlements which are just close by to our surburbs. They met with other children from these areas which helped them to see that there are real people like them in these settlements.

Many of us were born in such large families that there was no opportunity to be spoilt growing up. The modern family units are much smaller giving opportunities for lavishing children. Spoiling children seems to be a global problem not just limited to our Zimbabwean communities.

Back in the late nineties when I first hit the shores of the USA on a business trip, an American colleague asked me after I had visited several places in their country what I considered to be the fundamental difference between Zimbabwe and the USA. I remarked that the striking difference was that people in the USA were fat and the frightening thing was that their children were getting fatter.

Needless to say, they did not like my answer very well. Several years later, I was to give a related assessment to my Chinese host after spending two weeks in the industrial city of Shanghai in China. Their one child policy seemed to have badly affected their next generation. Everywhere I went I would see this fat child with parents on tow demanding one or another thing to be bought for them.

A lot of us spend too much time in the rat race to join the human race. Once we realise the time we should have been spending with our children was spent chasing money, we try to over-compensate by letting them have everything they want including junk food. Our guilty conscience leads us to buy expensive toys we can hardly afford.

Children need to learn early in life that they cannot have everything they want. We cannot say we had a terrible childhood just because we could not have all the latest toys that came onto shelves during our days.

Parents can help in this regard by not giving children enough pocket money to do everything they want. It helps them to make choices early in life such as if I use my pocket money to watch a movie, then I cannot also buy this video game that I want. It would also teach them to enjoy the things they already have more and to have fun without necessarily spending money.

One of the fundamental lessons children need to learn early in life is saving. If your child desires a bigger ticket item which is say similar to their whole month allowance, you can show them how to put aside say 25% of their allowance every month in a piggy bank and four months later purchase the item for cash. This teaches them the power of practical incremental saving together with the concept of delayed gratification.