Collaboration with Wealthify | Toys that will help your children to learn the value of saving

Learning to budget and save up to buy larger items are lifelong skills that will help your children's quality of life and hopefully prevent them getting into a debt trap when they are older. This guest post talks about how you can kick off their understanding from a young age...

Teaching your children to be good with money is essential. Kids that learn to save when they are young, generally speaking, grow into adults who spend responsibly.

There are lots of ways to teach them the value of money. For example, you could open a savings account like the one that you can find out about from this website. When your child is old enough, you can let them play a role in managing that account. Later, they can start to add some of the money that they are given, or earn, to the cash you save up for them.

But, when they are very young you need to take a different approach. At that stage, building up their understanding of what money is, how it works and how to manage it is what your main aim is. Fortunately, there are some great toys available that make doing this fairly easy.

Toys that teach your child their numbers and how to count

The first step is to teach your child to be able to count from 1 to 10. Any brightly coloured toys with these numbers printed on them in a bright and bold font will do the trick. Blocks are particularly good for this because you can put them in the right order. It will take your child a while to grasp the concept and learn their numbers. But, getting them to that stage is great fun.

Buy them a piggy bank

As soon as it is safe to do so, buy your child a piggy bank and some plastic coins. You can use the coins to reinforce their counting skills. Show them how to put the coins into the piggy bank. Later, you can switch to giving them real money and allowing them to save up to buy something special.

Toys to play shop with them

Using those plastic coins and fake notes you can begin to play shops with your child. Mark up some items with a price, let them be the shopkeeper and serve you. Select what you want and count the money out to pay for it. This combined with taking your children shopping and letting them see you pay with cash will make it easy for them to understand that things cost money.

Encourage them to save

As soon as you think they have begun to make this connection, let them pay for small things in the shop. Consider giving them a little money each week to put in their piggy bank. They can get spend it with your supervision.

At some point, they are going to want something that costs more than they have got. This opens up the opportunity for you to teach your child how to save up for something.

Later, you can buy them a money pig that is divided up into compartments. This will help your child to learn how to save for different things at the same time. It also opens up the opportunity to encourage them to put aside some of their money to give to others.


This post is a collaboration