Stop the Bank of Mom and Dad – Episode 625

This transcript was auto-generated and may contain errors.

[00:01] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Prosperity thinkers, we’re going to be talking about this certain group of people. What they do is they eat more than anyone else. They smell horrible. They always are distracted. Yes, we’re talking about the teenagers. But they’re actually pretty amazing if you think about it. Really good pieces in there. We’re just joking about it. Kim, you have a lot of people you work with that are, one, there’s buckets of people super successful with their kids, meaning they’re becoming financially responsible. And then there’s other people that are scrambling to make that happen. So let’s start at the baseline. What have you seen? What’s the pulse? And then we’ll go from there.

[00:46] Well, I think the most important thing to identify is that there must be a desire to stop the bank of mom and dad. And so this can occur at a variety of different ages. But the teenager space is an excellent time, if you haven’t done it already, to stop the bank of mom and dad. And it can be introduced with a very important question. So if you’re driving, maybe have a partner in the car, scribble this down for you or remember it, come back to this episode. And here is the question. Would you like more freedom and responsibility? When you ask a teenager if they would like more freedom and responsibility, when you ask a five-year-old or anybody in between, you will absolutely get a yes. And that is such a perfect open door to talk to them about what freedom looks like in your home,

[01:44] appropriate for your area, and also what responsibility looks like. So we’ll dive in and have some discussion about this. Spencer, are there thoughts from you before we begin? Yeah, absolutely. For me, I have three teenagers, three. They’re all teenagers now. I will say this of what I’ve learned from having teenagers, and I’m no expert. I’m going through it, which is I hear a lot of parents say, oh, wow. They like they roll their eyes and you have teenagers. And I am grateful that I have awesome teenagers. They’re solving problems. They’re doing interesting things. So first, we have to start with our perspective and the mindset that we’re in. If we are looking for problems, we’re going to find problems.

[02:39] If we’re looking for gratitude, I think we’ll find gratitude. So you’ve seen the same. How do you approach the general we’ll call the value foundation? Well, it is interesting because my children are well into their adulthood. They’re in their late 20s, and some of them have their own children, and they have proven themselves to be effective adults. They know how to handle the monetary space. They are good at developing relationships and at being grateful. Our entire Busting Scarcity Mindset book are examples of what it takes when you set aside the scarcity, the fear, the frustration, the appearance of all the negative things that come up with anything in life, but specifically teenagers, and instead fill it with the prosperity, the gratitude, the approach of let’s look for the good here.

[03:43] And there’s no more important skill for you to demonstrate to your teenagers than that ability. Now, there’s going to be times when you blow it. I remember on a Saturday morning, I always enjoyed asking my kids, if today is successful, what has to have happened for you to be pleased with it? And out came sometimes there was a birthday party I didn’t even know about, or somebody had a real hope that they just got quiet reading time, or that was a real thing. Yes, kids can enjoy reading time. Or somebody really wants to go play soccer in the park with the family, or whatever it is. Sometimes that question enabled that to come to the forefront when it wouldn’t normally have happened. So to back up with teenagers, you can ask them their opinion.

[04:39] You can talk to them about freedom and responsibility, and let them step up a level. And yes, there will be failures. That’s the second part of the story, is I didn’t ask that question one Saturday morning. And some things occurred that caused the day to get away from us. And I had a very upset daughter at dinnertime because she didn’t get to go literally play soccer in the park, because I didn’t know that it was important to her. And thankfully, you know, summertime, right? We lived in a space where we could still go after dinner to do said soccer game. But that was an example. And it made me just religious about it on Saturday mornings. I set my phone alarm so that I would make sure to ask that question.

[05:25] And so it’s important for us to demonstrate the behavior that we want our children to model, because they’re going to pay attention to what we do way more than what we say. And the financial literacy space, I prefer to use the term financial competency, right? You can’t homework money. We want them to be competent with dollars. We don’t want them to just learn about the dollars. It’s something that is so fun with teenagers because they’re in a space of life where they see the debt and destruction, to use the title that you started with, of so many families going on and even aspects of our country, if they’re worldly enough to pay attention to that. And so we can show them another way. And this is a great time to talk about the mortgage on the home and good debt,

[06:23] the debt that you have on the car, what student loan debt looks like. And again, model the behavior, model the behavior as much as you can. And if you can’t, combine with another family that can. We had a great experience in our family with another family that wanted access to farming. They wanted to teach their children how to farm. And they had tried a couple different occasions, but their family was so good at the computer that any time they got their kids into a farming environment, they ended up getting pulled into the office because they were so good at the computer. So I said, I promise you, we will not do any computer work. We ended up having this family over and for a weekend planted our entire garden,

[07:10] which is normally a two or three weekend process, but they had enough kids that we got it done in a weekend and it was a great experience for them. So that’s the kind of thing that you can do. If your family doesn’t have wealth, for example, combine with a family that does figure out what you can give. And there are absolutely things to their children so that they can give to your children some knowledge around wealth. If your family has an abundance of fill in the blank skill in an area, contribute that. And that’s a space where your children can learn so much from their friends, parents or people at your church or get help at the Boys and Girls Club if you need to. There are experts in all areas of life that contribute to the knowledge so that your children can have more freedom

[08:01] so that then they can have more responsibility, which means they can have more freedom. And this is the way to develop an amazing summer for your teenagers. That’s so good. I dig that. And especially because, you know, being in a world where there’s so much noise and we all hear the noise and there’s a difference between just consuming and applying, which reminds me of a funny story. So and this is a story where a bunch of professors, they were invited onto an airplane. They all get on and immediately over the radio. This is before the plane takes off or anything is announced that the plane was built by their students. So all of the professors pull the exit doors. They jump off. Everyone’s leaving except for one professor on there.

[08:58] They go and they ask him to say, Why didn’t you leave? And we would expect something else. And he said, Well, if these are our students, I don’t need to worry about the plane crashing because it probably won’t even start. It made me laugh because so many people will consume but never take action. So many parents will think, Oh, I’d really like to know what’s going on with my kids. But they won’t take the time to say, How can you get more? How would you like more freedom and responsibility? So many parents think, but they don’t take the time to say, What would today have to be successful like what you’ve done? There’s one step, but we have to take multiple steps to be more prosperous. So Kim, as I share the humor there, but I think, OK, we have teenagers.

[09:55] We want to help them. They’re doing work. They’re collaborating. What have you seen? And we’re running the inverse right now. What have you seen? Absolutely not work. So I want the avoid. This absolutely doesn’t work. Don’t do this. What does that look like? Sitting and talking and trying to teach via talking. It’s just not going to get good results. In fact, it may end up getting negative results. Now you can do some of that, but you must not do all of that. You must not make the teaching everything. And then the other thing that is just so critical is it doesn’t work if you won’t, as a parent, let yourself be human and fallible and make mistakes and own up to those mistakes. And I can remember times, for example, saying to my kids,

[10:53] Don’t yell and then yelling at them, right? Because we get mad. It’s the heat of the battle. It’s the moment and we yell. And so it’s what you do after that when you can take a moment and take a breath and calm down and help them see how to handle that situation and apologize. So the behavior that we want our children to model, when we make a mistake and model the opposite behavior, we’ve got to own up to it. Humanize. I like that. So we’ve got a phrase at the beginning of this podcast. It’s around freedom and responsibility. We’ve got the intention. You set a weekly alarm to sit there and say, What would this day have looked like to be successful? And notice that’s a presupposition. We’re talking to the future and then looking back.

[11:53] Lastly, we’re going to make mistakes. For you parents, that’s OK. For you grandparents, it’s even easier because you’re probably a little more detached from the situation. For anyone that’s learning this, you have a membership. There’s two styles, meaning there’s free material and then there’s more advanced. Where is the best place to go inside of that? ProsperityParents.com. Take advantage of what is there for free. Get on the app. Enjoy the community. And then if you want to step it up a notch, join the paid for course. And one of my favorite things about that is the benefit of getting a weekly refrigerator sheet. So we’ve got a really fun sheet that gets emailed out every week. It has the save, spend, and share jars on it like we talked.

[12:50] It has the expected list on it. It has the expense list on it. And yes, you can do some fun things with apps these days, but we found for all of our thousands of parents that are inside the community, the value of the refrigerator sheet literally printed out, thrown on the fridge or the bulletin board in the family room or what have you, is what guides the discussions and the behaviors and the motivations the best. Easy. Okay. That’s it. Simple, easy, straightforward. Check it out at ProsperityParents.com. And if you have unique situations, challenges, questions, email address, hello at ProsperityThinkers.com. It’s exclusive for you prosperity listeners on the podcast. If you’re getting this on YouTube, we’ll let you slide in as well.

[13:44] Hello at ProsperityThinkers.com. Thanks. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you, visit ProsperityThinkers.com.