She knows how money feels in her hands. She knows what it feels like to spend it on something she later regrets. And she is learning, slowly and sometimes painfully, that every financial decision has a consequence she will have to live with.
This is entirely intentional.
When we sell her old things–clothes she has outgrown, toys she no longer plays with–the money from the sale goes to her, as a reward for the maturity it takes to let something go. Sometimes it is not easy. Parting with something that still has sentimental value costs her something real. But she makes the decision. The money is hers. And so is the lesson.
I do not stand in her way when she wants to spend. If she feels like throwing a little money away on something impulsive, that is her right. It is also an experience she needs to have. The frustration of a bad purchase, the slight shame of a decision that did not pay off; these are not things I can protect her from, and I would not want to.
What I do is ask questions.
When she comes home wide-eyed about yet another stuffed cat, her collection is already considerable, I might say: you already have a bed full of them. Are you sure you want another one, or would it make more sense to buy yourself a nice set of coloured pencils? I then respect her decision, sometimes through gritted teeth. But it has to be hers. How is she supposed to learn if she never actually practises managing money?
She also has an investment account on Scalable.
Every month a small amount goes in for her future. She knows about it, and she enjoys watching the performance chart move. She is nine years old and already understands that money can grow, that markets fluctuate, and that patience is part of the strategy. I cannot think of a better financial education than that.
The urgency of this is not just personal. In the UK, 1 in 4 young adults between 18 and 24 are in some form of financial difficulty, representing approximately 1.3 million people, according to StepChange research from 2024. Unemployment is the single most common driver of debt among this age group, cited by 1 in 5 young adults who sought help.
In the United States, the average debt among Generation Z increased by 7.8% in 2025 alone, the highest increase of any age group.
And yet the most telling finding from the same StepChange research is this: more than half of young adults said they would turn to family first for financial advice if they were in difficulty. Family ranked above every other source, above financial advisors, above banks, above social media, because young people trust the people who know them, and because they value lived experience over institutional guidance.
That is both a responsibility and an opportunity. The financial education most schools still fail to provide can begin at the kitchen table. It can begin with a wallet.
Among young adults with a college degree, 64% have taken on student loan debt, and 81% of those are still carrying it.
The most common categories where debt accumulates for young people are student loans, credit cards, auto loans and, increasingly, buy-now-pay-later schemes that disguise debt as convenience. A 2021 study by the FINRA Investor Education Foundation found that adults aged 18 to 24 scored lowest of all age groups on financial literacy questions; an average of 4.08 correct out of 7, compared to a national average of 4.99.
I grew up without pocket money. When I wanted something, it was often a problem. The questions were always the same: why do you need that? You do not need that. And when I finally left home and made my own financial decisions for the first time, I made terrible ones.
I built up debt quickly. Around 2'000 euros at a time when I was still in training and had almost nothing coming in. I remember the shame very clearly, the unopened letters piling up, and the day my father found them and I had to confess everything. It was one of the worst feelings I have ever had.
Today I know exactly where it came from, from a complete absence of financial education and the practical experience that makes it real, rather than from any failure of character.
Financial literacy researchers and child development experts broadly agree on a few things: Pocket money, given regularly and without strings attached, is one of the most effective tools for building financial intuition in children. It creates real stakes, it makes money tangible, and it gives children the chance to make mistakes while the consequences are still small and recoverable.
Involving children in household financial conversations–not in a way that creates anxiety, but in a way that normalises the topic–also makes a measurable difference. Children who grow up in households where money is discussed openly are significantly more likely to develop healthy financial habits as adults.
Investment accounts for children, introduced and explained early, build a relationship with long-term thinking that most adults have to learn the hard way. Watching a portfolio chart move over months and years teaches patience, perspective and the difference between short-term noise and long-term direction in a way no classroom ever could.
There is something else I am trying to teach her, and it is harder to quantify. It is the understanding that she does not need as much as the world will tell her she does.
My father tends gardens for elderly women who live alone in large houses. Their husbands are gone. Their children have long since moved out. They cannot manage the property themselves and are forced to hire help. The house that was once the dream–the mortgage, the garden, the symbol of having made it–has become an anchor they cannot lift.
There is a paradox worth naming here. In many countries, having no debt history makes you invisible to the financial system. In the United States, in the UK, and increasingly across Europe, your credit score determines whether you can rent an apartment, finance a phone or access basic services. The system is designed to require participation in debt in order to exist within it. This is not an accident. It is a structural incentive to borrow, built into the foundations of modern consumer economies. Teaching a child to question this is not cynicism. It is the most practical thing a parent can do.
We were all told that this was the goal. The new car. The house that stretches the budget to its limit. The consumption that cries "success". I understand now that the best feeling I have is owing nothing to anyone. That is what I want her to understand before she is old enough to be sold a different story.
Consumer debt is an entirely predictable result of a system designed to profit from people who were never taught to question it. The antidote is knowledge, practised early and often. It begins in a wallet she holds in her own hands.
The performance chart on her Scalable account went up last month. She noticed before I did.
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