021: How Much "Grown Up World" Should I Share With My Children?

Download: MP3 (44.5 MB)

Life seems to just get more and more complicated as you grow up. It’s great having freedom as an adult, but with all of that freedom comes a great deal of responsibility. Part of the role we play as parents is keeping our children from having to experience the complexity and stress of all of that added responsibility, but at some point they’ll need to know the things we know and have the skills we possess if we want them to be successful as adults. How early is too early to start preparing them for life as they grow up?

Ben and Rachel talk through this topic and share practical ideas from their own experience for equipping your child without overwhelming them. They explain how children are naturally curious and inclined to learn and grow in new skills, and how using these natural tendencies can make the learning process easier and fun for everyone.

Highlights, Takeaways, & Quick Wins

• Children are natural contributors.
• We can shape children’s natural tendency to want to contribute toward equipping them for some of the things we have to do as adults.
• Our children’s sense of security is in the adults that are in charge of them.
• When you share your adult world with your kids, be careful not to use words that compromise their sense of security.
• Communicate change objectively and without projecting your feelings onto your kids.
• When teaching our kids about time, we want to do it in a way that they can grasp based on where they are in their development.
• We have to be diligent as parents to know what our kids are able to handle at their age.
• If we’re not willing to have hard conversations with our kids, it causes more fear and anxiety for them.

Show Notes

• 05:00 Ben: When I say “grown-up world,” I’m talking about things that mostly adults are responsible for, like taking care of the bills, dealing with debt, finances, budget, jobs, and goals—that kind of stuff. This is kind of an interesting topic for us because our oldest is really starting to become interested in some of those things that are beyond his realm of responsibility right now. We could just say, “Here’s your allowance. You can spend it on whatever you want,” and be really hands-off. While I do like hands-off at a certain point, I feel like this is an opportunity to give them some insight into what it takes to be an adult and the responsibilities that come with that.
• 05:58 That’s a key component for equipping them to be successful adults. It’s not just showing them how to do those things. I remember being a junior or senior in high school, about to get out into the real world, and I had some anxiety. I remember feeling anxious because I didn’t know how to do some of that stuff. I had quite a learning curve when it came to managing a checkbook and that kind of thing. How is important, but what’s even more important than the how is the why, how those things are connected to our values and how our values play out in the way we do those things.
• 06:51 One of the great benefits is that children are natural contributors. They like to help out. That doesn’t always seem true, but they want to be independent and do things on their own. Most of the time, I’ve found that when I’m not the one pushing my agenda and what I want them to do, they’ll naturally look for ways to contribute because they want to add value to the family. They like the feeling of accomplishing something for themselves and adding value to their family.

We can shape children’s natural tendency to want to contribute toward equipping them for some of the things we have to do as adults.

Use Responsibilities as Opportunities

• 07:50 It makes me check my attitude toward those things. When I think about budget, though Rachel handles more of that than I do, and the responsibility of having a job, I tend to feel a little bit burdened by those things. I forget what it was like to feel like this was a privilege, something I get to do. It’s been good for me when thinking through this to remember that these are fun responsibilities. Sometimes worry and anxiety come into play, but when you’re looking at it objectively,

It’s a privilege to be able to manage the practical needs in our lives and to shape them into the kind of life we want for ourselves.

• 08:50 Rachel: It’s kind of weird, because I’ve handled the budget since we were first married. Ben came to me as my husband and we were kind of a mess, as far as finances were concerned. I really enjoyed the challenge of fixing that. I enjoyed seeing where the puzzle pieces went and that kind of thing. Now, I don’t enjoy that quite as much because there are so many more responsibilities with the kids, but every now and then I enjoy figuring out what goes where. We work on a very detailed budget, line by line and penny by penny. That’s always the way I’ve done things.
• 09:43 Ben: A parallel to this is that we have a financial budget, but we also have a time budget. It works out in the way that we manage our schedule. One night we were sitting down at dinner and I said to Jadon, “Jadon, if you could be in charge for one night, you could change the rules to be whatever you wanted them to be and the schedule to be whatever you wanted it to be, how would you change it?” He came through with the obvious answer, “We would stay up as late as we want.” I started to ask him questions like, “Okay, if you stay up late but you still have to get up early for school in the morning, how are you going to get enough sleep?” I started to see the wheels turn in his head; he was starting to grasp that there was actually a purpose behind the rules, guidelines, and the schedule we’ve established.
• 10:48 Rachel: That’s important for kids, especially when it comes to things like finances and time. In our entrepreneur-world, sometimes we can get into those seasons where we are working all the time and sacrificing sleep. If we open those conversations with our kids and say, “This is a temporary thing. It’s only going to happen from this week to this week,” we bring our kids into the conversation and almost have them hold us accountable to that. For example, we typically do at least one family fun day a month, but Ben had some extra work that needed to get done, so we decided for the month of September not to have any family fun day so that Ben could work and I could take the kids to the park or something like that.
• 11:42 We explained that to the kids, and while they were a little bit disappointed at first, they understood the reasoning behind it when we told them, “This is what we have to do in order to get projects done on time.” Expose them to that kind of thing, knowing that it has an end point. The first weekend in October, we’re going to take a family fun day. They’ve sacrificed the whole month of September, and if we don’t follow through with that end of that season, then they don’t really learn anything from that.

Guard Your Childrens’ Sense of Security

• 12:24 Ben: They do learn an unhealthy precedent of, “Oh, I can set these boundaries or guidelines, but I might break them.” That messes with their sense of security. We’ve established that it is a healthy thing to let your kid into the world of some of your adult responsibilities and show them those things, but it’s also important to take care with the way that you do that.

When you share your adult world with your kids, be careful not to use words that compromise their sense of security.

• 13:09 As we grow, our sense of security becomes more complex. As adults, we might find our security in a job, having a certain number of clients, having a certain amount of income, or in a spouse. Our children’s sense of security is simple—it’s in the adults that are in charge of them. When we talk about things with them, we need to be careful not to use words that could potentially put our emotions about a situation onto them. For example, the situation we were in at the beginning of this month was a little bit tense. Rachel and my sense of security is a little bit different, but there’s still the anxiety and worry of wondering if we would meet our budget. We finally decided that we had to have a plan one way or the other.
• 14:21 We decided that if we didn’t make a certain amount by the end of the month, we would put our house on the market. That’s definitely not the ideal, but it was a good thing for us to have a plan, to know we were on the same page, and to move forward together. If we were to sit down with our children and explain that to them, their sense of security isn’t in this house, whereas some of our sense of security might be attached to that. If we come across as anxious or worried when it comes to losing this house, they begin to think, “Maybe I should put my security in that, too.”

What’s most important for our children to know is that we love them, and we’re not going anywhere.

• 15:15 As long as that’s true, it doesn’t matter what happens as far as they’re concerned. As adults, we understand all of the complexity that goes into that, but if we were to sit down and explain it, we would want to do so objectively. Simply state facts. This could work for a number of things; this example just happens to have to do with budget. Maybe because of a job you’re having to move to another city. There are definitely some things that are sad and emotional, like having to leave friends behind and leaving something familiar, and those things have to be dealt with, but that’s not where their sense of security is.
• 16:06 Rachel: I was talking about this with my book club ladies last night; I realized that between the ages of 10 and 12, which are some of the most volatile years of a kid’s life with junior high and that awkward stupid phase, my family moved out of state, back to state, and then within the state. We moved three times within those three years, which felt really traumatic for me. Part of that was that my parents divorced at that same time and the whole sense of security was up in the air. Ben and I have talked about, with moving, how that would affect our children. When you’re a parent, you don’t want to create a perfect world for your children, but you do want to take certain things into consideration. My sister has a mostly deaf son, and she has him enrolled in a deaf school, and if they were to move somewhere else, it could be that they couldn’t find the same services that they get now. Some of those things have to be taken into account whenever we’re making those decisions.
• 17:25 Ben: Not to discount what Rachel was going through, but I think the fact that her parents were no longer together was a major contributor to her feelings. Moving that much, or any major change in life, comes with its own set of emotional fallout. That does have to be dealt with. This isn’t to say that there isn’t something you have to work through emotionally. The more we can communicate change objectively and without projecting our feelings onto our kids, letting them feel their own feelings about it, the easier it’s going to be for us to have those conversations, and the easier it’s going to be for us to help them work through their emotions about it.

Teach the How & the Why

• 18:22 There is definitely some struggle and some trials, but there are also many good things in the adult world. I want to bring the focus of this conversation back to positivity. We want to focus on the why. It’s important to teach them the skills for how to do some of these things. Brookes says, “The amount of real-world skills taught in schools is next to nothing.” I had an economics class that taught me about stocks, but nobody knew how to balance a checkbook.
• 19:12 Rachel: I took economics when I was 15. You don’t even understand it at that point. We would have to do these stock reports, and it was always a guess. Maybe that was just me. I didn’t know how to read that stuff and I wasn’t interested in it at all. I probably would have enjoyed a class where you learned how to pick the bargain price at the grocery store or something—something real-world.
• 19:44 Ben: It’s important for us to take on the role in our child’s life of equipping them with the how, how to get those things done, but what’s even more important than that is connecting those things to the why, to the values. This is a great opportunity, when you’re focusing on one aspect, to re-evaluate our reasons for the choices we’ve made. Sometimes we fall into this trap of, “We do it this way because this is the way we’ve always done it.” There’s that joke where the daughter-in-law comes over, gets the pan, chops the butt off of the ham and puts it in the pan. The mother-in-law says, “Why do you do that?” The daughter says, “I don’t know. It’s the way we’ve always done it, but I’ve never understood why.” They go to the grandmother and they say, “Why do we cut the butt off of the ham?” The grandmother says, “I don’t know why you two do it, but I did it because I didn’t have a pan that was big enough.”

Sometimes we have reasons for doing things that, once upon a time, were valid, but now those reasons no longer fit within our values.

• 21:18 It’s a great opportunity for us to bring those things back into question and re-establish our values around doing those things. An example is with the budget. We do a detailed budget with our money so we aren’t tempted to spend money on things we don’t need. We have money for things we really need or want later on. You can tie that to a long-term mentality and say, “We don’t just focus on things we want right now; we save so we can have the things we really want down the road.” It’s about the long term.
• 22:01 Rachel: You can open those conversations with kids, too. Our kids have been asking to go to this place called The Jumpy Place, which is basically indoor inflatables. They jump around everywhere and it’s super fun, they have a great time, but for all of them to go it’s probably $60. During the month of September, we said, “We’re not going to spend anything extra. The only things we can do are things we already have memberships to.”
• 23:05 That’s been hard for the boys, but I’ve tried to engage the conversation every now and then where I say, “Would you rather have a day at the jumpy place, or in another year, possibly go to Disneyworld?” They have no idea what Disneyworld is like or how magical it is. We can open those conversations with our kids, and they might not fully understand it now. Time relativity is hard for them. They don’t get the whole, “I won’t get this now, but I’ll get this next year” concept. Get them thinking about these things, “Should I buy now or save for later?”
• 23:29 Ben: The more practice they have with that, the more they’ll develop that sense of time. The reason some of us feel like putting something off a year, two years, or five years, is an eternity, is because growing up, we didn’t develop a sense of time that caused us to look at things in the long term. I’ve had to fight against the tendency to think of three to five years as a long time, when really, it’s relatively short when you’re talking about a big goal or dream that you have. Seeing something accomplished in three to five years really is a short amount of time, but it seems long to a majority of the world.
• 24:20 Rachel: I remember in college, when I first went away, it was the first time I was away from my parents and that kind of thing. I’ve had a job since I was fifteen because my mom worked several jobs to help us have food to eat, so if I wanted anything extra, I was responsible for that. I remember going away to college and thinking, “One day I’m going to get married, and it could be four years from now, but my mom is probably not going to be able to help much. I’m going to start saving.”
• 24:52 As a freshman in college, at 18, I started a wedding savings. I don’t remember how much I had, but it was several thousand dollars by the time Ben and I got married. I don’t know if I’m comfortable with my boys saying, “I’m going to get married someday, so I’m going to put aside a wedding savings,” but I’d like my kids thinking about some of those things. It was four years since I started that savings, and it didn’t seem like it was that long of a time. I knew it would pass by pretty quickly. As you get older, time passes very quickly anyway. It’s only when you’re waiting to graduate high school that it feels excruciatingly slow.

When teaching our kids about time, we want to do it in a way that they can grasp based on where they are in their development.

• 26:07 Ben: Obviously, you wouldn’t sit your kid down in front of a QuickBooks program and teach them the ins and outs, or maybe you would. For our boys right now, we give them an allowance. Their allowance isn’t tied to anything that they’re doing necessarily, to jobs and chores, although they do contribute. They have after dinner chores they do every night. We decided that, as long as we have it in our budget, that was always something they would have available to them. That has been a great tool for us to show them, “If you spend this money as soon as you get it, these are the things you can get. If you save it, you can get this and this.” We’ll walk them around the toy isle, because that’s what they care about right now, a long with food.
• 27:39 Rachel: The oldest said he wanted a couple of dollars because fruit snacks cost a dollar and he could buy two packages. So, they want toys and food.
• 27:52 They get that from me, spending your extra money on extra food when you have plenty of food. Robert Guzzo in the seanwes Community posted a thread in a forum that he shared. He had one of his kids do a Lambo Goal. Basically, it’s having a big goal that seems out of your reach and then having some steps in place to accomplish it. He had a picture of these Lego figurines he wanted to get, and they figured out how much it would cost to get all of them. They kept tallying up how much he was saving on a piece of paper and he held onto that paper, writing down as he would save money, until he had enough to get it. That’s a lot of fun.
• 29:36 Rachel: That’s a great way to teach your kids about money and the value of a dollar. Last week, our boys did a few extra things. The five year old used the leaf blower after Ben had finished mowing the yard, and the six year old cleared all the branches from clipping the shrub. We paid them a dollar each, and they were super excited. You don’t have to pay them much.
• 30:13 Ben: I even had a situation where I needed Jadon to watch his brothers for a little bit, and I said, “Hey Jadon, I need you to watch your brothers,” and he said, “You’re going to have to pay me.” I said, “How much do you want?” and he said, “I want $200.” I said, “I can’t pay you $200,” so he said, “Hm. Okay, how about $1?” I said, “Deal.” We have to work on his negotiation skills. He probably could have gotten away with $5.
• 31:07 Rachel: I would have said $10. That’s pretty valuable.

What Is the Appropriate Age?

• 31:22 Ben: Ryan asked, “When I was little, my father wanted me to watch movies with him to learn about the ‘real world,’ like Terminator, and it didn’t quite work out. Not only how much, but when should you expose your child to the grown-up world?” This comes back to the sense of security thing. There are some issues like death, brutality, and violence, that they don’t have any context for. The world is very black and white to them, so they don’t understand actors being in front of cameras with special effects. It all seems and feels real to them.
• 32:15 Rachel: According to brain science, there’s a particular age where children can tell the difference between fantasy and reality. I can’t remember the exact age, but it’s somewhere between four and five. When you think about kids seeing a movie, even ones like Disney fairy tales where they have a dark witch in them, there’s a difference between the scenes with the good people, the heroes, and the scenes with the villains—it gets very dark. They know that difference, but they don’t know the difference between reality and fantasy. In their minds, they’re thinking, “This is real. A witch could come get me one night and take me away, or she might have an apple I would eat…” It causes a lot of anxiety for kids who aren’t able to tell that difference yet.
• 33:18 My dad, when he was around, would let me watch Friday the 13th—Freddy Kruger and those huge claw-like hands was freaky stuff. That was not appropriate for a kid of my age. I remember having nightmares. I had a tree that butted up against my window, and every time it scratched my window, I thought it was Freddy Kruger trying to get in. That stuff is really traumatic for kids. We have to be diligent about screening that stuff. I’m not saying that we should protect them from everything. I remember the kids learning about things like September 11th in school, and our oldest learned about it as a Kindergartener. At first, it made me uncomfortable because a lot of people died; it was a very traumatic event for the American world. It was good that he was able to talk about that with classmates and with the teacher. He came home and was asking questions about it. It’s not that our kids are not able to handle these things; it depends on each kid.

We have to be diligent as parents to know what our kids are able to handle at their age.

• 34:45 Ben: I’m probably pushing the envelope a little bit by taking Jadon to see the new Star Wars movie.
• 34:51 Rachel: Jadon is at an age where he knows the difference between what’s real and what’s not; he’s eight. That opens up a whole world for kids, because they know what’s possible and they know what’s not possible, like Darth Vadar.
• 35:46 Ben: I feel like I didn’t have as many meaningful conversations about adult things as a child that I can remember as maybe would have been healthy, talking about the reality of what’s going on, how it impacts us, and how it impacts other people. Not only do those things help us understand what’s going on in our world, it activates our empathy for other people and helps us feel gratitude for our own situation. I think that’s definitely a healthy thing.
• 36:29 Rachel: We just need to know our kids and the level of trauma they can handle when talking about those kinds of things. When Jadon was in first grade, I think, the school district where we are had a bomb threat, and they locked down the schools. They wouldn’t let parents come get their kids. This was right after Sandy Hook, where the guy came in and killed a bunch of elementary aged kids. Parents were freaking out because they didn’t know what was going to happen and they didn’t say what school it was. A person was actually sighted outside of one of the schools, and they wouldn’t let us know which one it was. It was pretty freaky.
• 37:23 We had to have that conversation with our child when he came home. He said, “I didn’t understand what was happening.” There are places where the real world comes in to meet our kids, and we have to be ready to have those conversations. It was really hard; how do you tell your kid, who’s in first grade, that just a few months ago, there were 20 Kindergarteners and first graders who were shot for no reason? We have to be gentle. We didn’t tell him what kind of gun; I don’t even think we told him that they were shot. We talked about the tragedy that had happened at this school, and it was a good conversation.

If we’re not willing to have hard conversations with our kids, it causes more fear and anxiety for them.

• 38:18 Then they’re wondering, “What did happen? Should I be afraid?” That’s a scary thing for kids if your school is on lockdown and no one is telling you anything. You don’t know what can happen.
• 38:51 Ben: As a recap, it is important and valuable to let our kids into the world of adult responsibilities and, in gentle ways, to show them how those things work. Most importantly, we tell them why and the values that go behind those things.