Crypto Has an Amazing Opportunity to Teach Children How Money Works
By: Patrick Toner
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Finance, Education

The lack of financial literacy is one of the primary drivers of the wealth gap between the rich and the rest of society. The easiest way to win a game is to make sure the people you’re playing with don’t understand the rules, how the game works, or even the fact you’re playing a game in the first place.

Here’s a fun game you can play with your kids:

Set up a Monopoly board. Don’t explain any of the rules, just tell them how to roll the dice and move their token around the board.

Don’t explain how to buy property. Don’t explain rent. Don’t tell them there’s a bank and that it’s supposed to be separate from all of the players.

Now play the most aggressive style of Monopoly that you can. Buy all the property. Put hotels on everything as fast as you can. Be a stickler for the rules. Rules they don’t know. What are the chances your kid wins this Monopoly game?

Good luck kid.

This is the situation for most young adults. No one taught them how to swim and now they’re expected to jump in the water with sharks. Of course they’re going to do poorly. They haven’t had any time to practice and they were barely told the rules of the game to start with.

It shouldn’t be surprising that young adults are going deep into debt the second they get out of high school. Huge student loans, credit cards, cars that are far too expensive. No one reads the terms they’re signing. No one understands the game they’re playing.

The result is always the same: they lose.

Debt is spiraling, they can’t afford payments, and now the only option is to go out into the world and work. Work work work work work. Gotta make the payments. Gotta get these people off my back. So I’m going to get a job and I’m going to pay these things. Eventually I do some basic math and realize I’m going to be paying this back for literally the rest of my life. My only option is work. Maybe eventually I start working 2 or 3 jobs.

Lots of Americans get to about 25 years old and realize they’ve been had. But now it’s too late. No one explained the rules of Monopoly to them and now someone else owns all of the property and there are hotels on every single one of them.

Good luck kid. Maybe you can get a job at one of those hotels?

I think crypto can help us teach our kids about money.

Kids are almost entirely reliant on their parents to teach them about money. All other things aside, the biggest reason is that money itself is very difficult for kids to get their hands on.

If you’re a kid and you want to buy something what are your options?

You can ask your parents.

If your parents also don’t have money that’s the end of it. They’re busy losing their own Monopoly game. They don’t even have money to give you.

If your parents do have money and they’re willing to give it to you, you probably learn about money faster. Maybe. Except do you ever really have an incentive to save? To protect your money from people who want to take it? Probably not. You just ask mom and dad for more.

Maybe you hit the jackpot and your parents are the good types mentioned in the original article. They give you an allowance and maybe make you do some chores to earn it. Maybe they help you put together a little budget and a savings plan. And then they make you weed their gardens or take out the trash.

Immediately you’re being taught that work is how you solve money problems.

Even the parents who are GOOD at teaching their kids about money are immediately training their kids that work = money. Work work work work work. “Find someone who has money, figure out a thing they need, and then try to get them to give it to you by agreeing to do whatever they want.”

This probably isn’t an unhealthy exercise on its own. It’s certainly better than the alternatives. But why does learning to budget and save have to be mentally tied to doing things kids don’t want to do? Aren’t we just prepping them to accept jobs they hate to fix their financial problems?

These are the kinds of things I tried to do with my kids and in hindsight a lot of it was because I very much disliked the jobs I was working at the time. “Of course getting money has to be painful. Look at what I’m doing every day”.

This doesn’t seem all that great either.

Crypto allows us to just make up money out of nowhere and give it to kids

I remember loving the Pizza Hut BOOKIT program as a kid.

There was a thing I wanted: pizza.

There was one way to get it: read.

It’s a simple concept and it incentivizes a behavior we want our kids to repeat. We want them to read. Over the past 30+ years the program has been a huge success.

While I really liked pizza and I eventually grew to really love reading, the thing I remember most about this was that it was one of the first times I remember being able to get something I wanted without needing to beg someone in a position of authority for it.

Pizza isn’t free. I understand this was a marketing scheme that’s been pointed in a positive direction. But it ended up having a pretty profound impact on my life.