How to teach personal reconciliation and book balancing
"If you are wanting to teach your kids basic accounting principles there is some good stuff on Khan Academy. However most of the stuff takes practice to really make it hit home and its kinda boring (Especially to kids who may or may not care about it). Maybe if you help them set up an account on Mint so that they are at least aware of their finances. Think it also has a heap of videos you can watch that teaches basic personal finance. If you actually want them to understand the techniques and methods behind creating & maintaining a personal ledger/journal and reconciling it against a bank account you are getting into what undergraduates study and there are plenty of first year textbooks around. Look around for a second hand one that is a few revisions old and they are usually dirt cheap (I scored one for only a dollar not that long ago). I feel like the mindset is what matters most. Journals and all that jazz are easy if you have the right mindset. That is something that you really have to demonstrate to your children rather than teach. Meaning you yourself keeping your finances in order and showing them how you organise and file your bills/ credit cards etc. (So they learn the importance of keeping financial records; meaning in the future when its talked about it doesn't fall on deaf ears) Emphasize the whole ""living within your means"" because even if they don't understand bookkeeping or learn anything else at least their finances won't turn out too bad."
A system comparing students to themselves a year ago is what I think would work best. Therefore you are graded based off the students you have, not the grade you are in.  This would mean if I was in 2nd grade and read at a 1st grade level then went to 3rd grade and read at a 4th grade level, then the teacher would receive higher marks. This would of course be averaged out throughout the class with outliers left off (because some students always get A's, and some... not so much).   Its not a perfect system, but its better than saying that the only performance indicators are not touching children and keeping your job long enough to get tenure How to win friends &amp; influence people is even more so just common knowledge and common courtesy than Art of War, but sometimes seeing that stuff written or presented a certain way can be very impactful. I know it was for me, with both books. This is a big and complex topic, but it's one I think people get wrong a lot.  There's a lot of ways to treat a child's pocket money: Tell a kid that they're getting $10/week allowance.  Help them keep it safe, but don't give them access to it: Put it in a drawer in your office, or a piggie bank on a high shelf.  Encourage them to save up for a big purchase.  Help them decide what to spend it on.  When they find something they want, talk it over with them to make sure it's right for them. This seems like a good approach, because it encourages thrift, long term thinking, savings, and other important elements of real life.  But it's a TERRIBLE idea.  All it does is make the child think of it as if it wasn't really their money.  The child gets no benefits from this, and will certainly not learn anything about savings. Give the kid $10/week.  Full stop. This seems like a bad idea, because the kid is just going to waste it.  Which they will.  :)  That's the point!  There's NO way to learn except by experience. Try and shift control of discretionary spending to the child as and when appropriate.  Give them some money for clothes, or a present for their birthday, and let them spend it.  If they're going to be spending all day at some event, give them money for lunch.  And if they misspend it - tough!  No kid is going to starve in one day because the spend their lunch money at a video arcade, but they will learn a valuable lesson.  :) You have to be careful here of two mistakes.  First, only do this for truly discretionary spending.  If your kid needs clothes for school, then you better make sure they actually buy it.  Second, make sure that you don't end up filling in the gaps.  What you're teaching here is opportunity costs, and that won't work if your child gets to have his cake and eat it too.  (Or go to the movies and STILL get that new Xbox game.) Have them get a job.  And, it should go without saying, give them control of the money.  It's incredibly tempting to force them to save, be responsible, etc.  But all this does is force them to look responsible...for as long as their under your thumb.  Nothing will impart the lessons about why being responsible is important like being irresponsible.  And it's sure as hell better to learn that lesson with some paper route money when your 14 than with your rent money when your 24... If these are children that may be employed, in a few years, it may well be worth walking them through some basics of the deductions around employment, some basic taxes, uses of banks, and give them enough of a basis in how the economy of the world works.  For example, if you get a job and get paid $10/hour, that may sound good but how much do various things eat at that so your take-home pay may be much lower?  While this does presume that the kids will get jobs somewhere along the way and have to deal with this, it is worth making this part of the education system on some level rather than shocking them otherwise. Rather than focusing on calculations, I'd be more tempted to consider various scenarios like how do you use a bank, what makes insurance worth having(Life, health, car, and any others may be worth teaching on some level), and how does the government and taxes fit into things. While I may be swinging more for the practical, it is worth considering if these kids will be away in college or university in a few years, how will they handle being away from the parents that may supply the money to meet all the financial needs? Each of us has experienced, at one time or another, the chaotic, turbulent and uncertain feelings and body states associated with the moment-by-moment onslaught of telephone calls, emails, meetings and to-do lists that are so common in our daily lives. During such times and experiences a person becomes stressed, de-centered and unfocused. How can one get a perspective on and transform these states-of-mind and body? Simply put, by becoming more mindfully-minded. "&gt;The odd thing about primary school education (that I hear from talking to teachers) is that the materials used in the classroom are all bought under some sort of district wide (or even state wide, in the case of texas) decision for which program to use.  It didn't used to be that way, but yes, that is pretty much how it is done these days... basically ""central planning"" and ""one size fits all"" as I said.  &gt;For reading they generally include a set of books (or single book) with a sequence of things to be taught. Teacher's who've been teaching for a long time will know which series has useful properties for teaching the material. They might refer to them by names, but it really just comes down to a set of materials and sequence of introducing material.   And of course none of that really has ANYTHING to do with actual ""reading"".  &gt;When one teacher says to another ""I used $X to supplement the required $Y"" it'd be like a software engineer saying ""I used a hash map instead of a map for that case because it had better performance for the use case"" - there's a fair amount of baggage in the statement, but another software engineer would understand the differences and know what tradeoffs were being made.  No. That's a rather poor analogy.  A better analogy would be: ""We used to use SAP, but then we got bought out by XYZ corporation, and now we have to build everything around Oracle."" (And the reality is that both choices are crap.)  &gt;As to the ""Master's in Reading"" - there's a lot of goofy degrees offered through the Education departments at state schools. A large part of it is because the union pay scales include things like education level. They tend to be equivalent to any terminal masters program you'd find in other subjects - including MBA. ""Take these classes - part time and summers over the next 3 years, and if you pass them all, we give you a piece of paper that says ""Masters of Education - Reading"" or similar. It comes down to something like 45 credit hours with a focus on something.  It's also a result of the ""requirement for continuing education"" to maintain Teaching licenses/certifications.  And yeah, it has created a lot of ""Underwater Basket Weaving Experts"" -- the problem is that they ACTUALLY *SINCERELY* BELIEVE that they have some significant ""expertise""... even though it can *not* be shown in their results (if it could, they would be ""all about"" merit pay).  &gt;I actually doubt that. It's going to come down to the sets of materials they have available for teaching. Some work, some don't. The structure of the system discourages improvisation, unfortunately, and the teachers often feel that they have their hands tied.  Young, beginning teachers feel they have their hands tied -- those types either leave teaching, or they succumb to the system.  The teacher in question (with the ""Masters"" in ""Reading"") succumbed to the system long, long ago.  And that teacher's whole concern was really just a ""brand X"" versus ""brand Y"" thing -- the teacher knows ""brand X"" and so can (and probably does) ""teach"" it while half-asleep.  Most long tenure teachers tend to get in a comfortable ""rut"" -- comfortable in no small because it is not only familiar, but also because it then requires little work to update their curricula or prepare anything new -- disrupting that (i.e. switching from ""brand X"" to ""brand Y"" is therefore nearly always met with either opposition or grumbling &amp; grudging compliance).  **It is INDEED ""the system"", but one must keep in mind that it is the ""teachers"" (collectively, in aggregate over time) that have essentially created that system.**" You could of course do the same yourself, but it is often tough to keep the discipline, and sometimes it gets really forgotten. Only you can say if you would be disciplined enough... Otherwise, it is a useful help, and it is free, so why not. There are no disadvantages. "If one takes a slightly more expansive view of the word ""saving"" to include most forms of durable asset accumulation, I think the reason some do and most don't is a matter of a few factors, I will include the three that seem obvious to me: Education Most schools in the US where I live do not offer personal finance courses, and even when they do, there is no opportunity for a student to practice good financial habits in that classroom setting. I think a simple assignment that required students to track every penny that they spend over the period of a few months would help them open their eyes to how much money is spent on trivial things that they don't need. Perhaps this would be more effective in a university setting where the students are usually away from home and therefore more responsible for the spending that occurs on their own behalf. Beyond simple education about personal finances, most people have no clue how the various financial markets work. If they understood, they would not allow inflation to eat away at their savings, but that's a separate topic from why people do not save. Culture Since much of the education above isn't happening, children get their primary financial education from their parents. This means that those who are wealthy teach their children how to be wealthy, and those who are poor pass on their habits to children who often also end up poor. Erroneous ideas about consumption vs. investment and its economic effects also causes some bad policy encouraging people to live beyond their means and use credit unwisely, but if you live in a country where the average person expects to eat out regularly and trade in their automobiles as soon as they experienced their highest rate of depreciation, it can be hard to recognize bad financial behavior for what it is. Collective savings rates reflect a lot of individuals who are emulating each other's bad behavior. Discipline Even when someone is educated about finances, they may not establish good habits of budgeting regularly, tracking spending, and setting financial goals. For me, it helps to be married to someone who has similar financial goals, because we budget monthly and any major purchases (over $100 or so) must be agreed upon at the beginning of the month (with obvious exceptions for emergencies). This eliminates any impulsive spending, which is probably 90% of the battle for me. Some people do not need to account to someone else in order to spend wisely, but everyone should find a system that works for them and helps them to maintain some financial discipline." Business is a really broad category of disciplines that no one book could ever possibly cover.   Given your background in psychology though, you might be into marketing or behavioral economics. Try out **Switch: How to Change Hard Things When Change is Hard** by  Chip and Dan Heath.   Also, try out Planet Money episodes. "Great response, thanks! I'll do my best to answer your questions.  1. I'm a genuine believer that everything, from calculus to charisma, can be taught to *most* people. Some people don't have the intelligence to ever learn calculus, for example, and some people will only ever be average at it. But most people can at least improve in most areas through education.   The messed up part is that professors are never formally taught to teach. Some of the things I listed I implicitly learned in grad school (e.g., when doing research, I learned how to filter out inaccurate information; when writing research papers, I learned how to organize information). I learned theories of motivation because I was in an org psych program, but I never learned how to apply them, especially in a classroom setting. I had to figure that out myself. But, yes, I do believe it's something that can be learned.   2. I think the vast majority of work related skills that people develop are learned on the job, as you mentioned. There are some generic skills students learn in college that can be applied to their work, however. I'm thinking of communication and social skills (although I'm probably biased, since those are the two topics I teach). College, it seems to me, is more about learning how to follow directions, figure things out for yourself, and work effectively in groups than any particular subject matter. And I think those skills do transfer well to the workplace.   3. I 100% agree with this. We're pressured to pass students and inflate grades. Character issues, including being disorganized, being dishonest, or just being rude, are diagnosed as psychological disorders and we have to ""accommodate"" students with these ""disabilities"" (to be clear, I 100% believe in psychological disorders, and I 100% support accommodating students with these disorders- I just think they are over-/ misdiagnosed these days).    Totally agree with your last paragraph." Thank you for replying. I assumed since I’m the one asking for advice from him I should be leading the conversation with questions mostly. Wondering if you have an examples of what questions. I have some prepared but any extra insight is helpful. What are you talking about? There are plenty of slaves who taught themselves to read and successfully hid their efforts from their owners. Hell, others decided to just leave. These slaves pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and were examples to other slaves.   Clearly there is no context, environment, and system that people exist in. We started with our son about age 5 or so.  He was at the time old enough to understand that you buy stuff using money.   We don't give allowance, rather we made up a job chart that he can put checks on, and give him a small amount for each job that he does.  This is meant to enforce the idea of 'work and get paid, don't work don't get paid', and associate the concept of work and money.   We also try to teach him the concept of giving, spending and saving, by having envelopes with those words on them and dividing the 'commission' money between them.   The give money is used for a charitable organization.  The save money is used in a couple of ways - either to save for a large item that he wants, or to put into a savings account.  The spend it money he is free to buy whatever he wants with.   We got this plan from the Dave Ramsey Show, and it has been really good so far.  The best thing about it is that when we are at the store and he sees something he wants, we can ask 'did you bring your money?'  This keeps the begging down to a minimum and also helps us teach him to make a list of stuff he wants and can save for. Horrible plan.  You are asking for a massive family feud over money. Don't mix extended family and money. You need to be able to make unemotional decisions about your finances and debt and you likely won't be able to make hard decisions that may be required if they would negatively impact your family. You don't want your brain and heart to fight. You will wind up losing your relationships with family, money, or most likely both. I had a chat with a coworker whose spouse also teaches music lessons. One interesting insight was that after raising prices, the children were much more likely to come prepared because the parents felt more invested when it cost them more. They were also less likely to cancel the lessons at the last minute. This is an argument in favor of TTT's suggestion to charge something even if we donate the income to charity. Along those lines it might also make sense to give discounts if the child comes prepared having practiced daily.  I agree that it's not a lot of paperwork for some additional pay, the problem is that I would also be tempted to buy a new piano and find other expenses to reduce the income. That's a discussion for another day.  I think the break-even point is probably somewhere around $1000/year when I weigh record-keeping time verses the income. So as long as we exceed that, I will probably encourage her to charge for the lessons even if she charges below the market for them. I will consider setting up a charitable giving account that they can pay to instead of paying us directly.