Learning Your Monetary ABCs: The Link between Emergent Literacy and Early Childhood Financial Literacy

Generations of young people, including the current generation, have endured parental admonitions about how difficult their parents had it when they were young, and how young people just don’t appreciate the value of a dollar or the meaning of a work ethic. But has there actually been a fundamental shift in how people handle their personal finances? Trends suggest that the current crop of parents, at least, have cause to worry both about their own and their children’s financial futures. Parents, teachers, school districts, boards and departments of education, and our entire nation must come to terms with the fact that, just as with literacy generally, students cannot afford to wait until middle or high school to begin learning about financial literacy. Until a set of financial literacy standards are adopted nationally, stakeholders of our educational system need to glean teachable moments of financial literacy from existing curricula in all subject areas. At the youngest grade levels, doing so will entail concentrating on the baseline concepts that form the foundation for the personal financial decisions children and, ultimately, adults must be prepared to make about building and managing wealth.