How to talk to your kids about money without raising kids who expect everything

Four years ago, we wrote a blog about the money conversations parents can have with kids at every age. A lot of the basics haven't changed: kids learn about money gradually, the lessons should grow with them, and what they see us do matters at least as much as what we tell them.

But the world our kids are learning about money in has changed quite a bit.

Last week, we shared a few findings from the 2026 Acorns Money Matters Report for Kids on our Instagram, and they clearly struck a nerve with parents.

The study surveyed 2,000 U.S. parents and 2,000 kids ages 6–17. One of the more startling findings: 80% of kids are familiar with virtual currencies used in games, while only 42% say they understand stocks. Sixty percent are already familiar with Buy Now, Pay Later. And 30% think financing groceries that way is a good financial decision.

Our kids are learning about money whether we teach them or not.

They are learning when they buy Robux, when they see an influencer unbox something, and when we tap a credit card at the grocery store. They learn when Amazon packages show up at the door, when they hear us complain that something is expensive, and when they notice that one friend seems to have everything while another doesn't.

The internet is excellent at teaching kids how to spend money. We need to get better at teaching them what money is actually for…and yet, parents are uncomfortable talking about it. One in three parents in the Acorns study said they've avoided money conversations because of their own financial situation, experiences or habits. Even more striking: 57% said talking with their kids about drugs, alcohol, puberty or sex would be easier than talking about money.

We get it. Money is emotional. It carries our histories, our mistakes, our fears, our ideas about success and sometimes our shame. But here's the good news: you do not need to have your own financial life perfectly figured out before you talk to your kids about money.

You just need to start talking.

Don't Have "The Money Talk"

One of our favorite ideas from Ron Lieber's book The Opposite of Spoiled is that money is an incredibly useful tool for teaching kids about much bigger things: patience, generosity, gratitude, judgment and what a family values. That means money shouldn't be a subject reserved for one serious conversation when your child turns 16 and gets a debit card. It should be ordinary.

Talk about it in the grocery store, at Target, and when you're booking a vacation. Talk about money when they ask you for a new pair of shoes, or when your family is giving to a cause you care about.  At Mana, the easiest money conversations to have with your kids are usually the ones that happen while you're already living your life.

Instead of:

"We need to sit down and talk about money."

Try:

"These strawberries are $9 and those are $5. Do you think there's a reason we'd pay $4 more for these?"

Or:

"We're choosing to spend more money on this vacation because traveling together is really important to us. There are other things we're spending less on so we can do it."

Those tiny conversations add up, and we promise they’re worth it.

Let Your Kids Hear You Make Choices

One thing we encourage parents to do is narrate financial decisions without narrating financial anxiety (there’s a difference). Kids don't need to know the balance of your investment account or lie awake worrying about your mortgage. But they can hear that money involves choices.

If your child asks for something expensive, instead of automatically saying: "We can't afford that," you might say: "That's not something we're choosing to spend our money on right now." Though those sentences sound similar, they teach very different lessons.

"We can't afford it" can make money sound scary and finite, especially when a child later sees you spend money somewhere else. Alternatively, "We're not choosing to spend money on that" introduces something much more useful: priorities.

To be clear, if you can't afford something, say so. Honesty about a tight month teaches its own lesson, and kids handle it better than most parents expect. The swap matters in the situation most of us are in at the checkout line, where we could buy the thing and have decided not to.

Money is always about tradeoffs. Even families with substantial wealth have to decide what is worth spending money on and what isn't. Let your kids see you make those decisions.

When they ask you something hard, ask why first

Most advice about talking to kids about money assumes you're the one starting the conversation. Some of the hardest moments go the other direction, usually in the car, usually when you're thinking about something else.

“Are we rich?”

“How much money do you make?”

“Why does Maya's family have a bigger house than we do?”

Lieber's advice here is the most useful thing in his book, and it's four words long: "Why do you ask?"

It buys you a few seconds, which helps. More usefully, it tells you what your child is after, which is rarely what the question sounds like. "Are we rich?" almost never means "please disclose your net worth." Sometimes a friend said something at school. Sometimes they overheard you on the phone and got worried. Sometimes they just learned the word and want to know whether it applies to them.

Once you know what prompted the question, you can answer the one they meant to ask. A child who's anxious needs to hear that your family is okay. A child who's comparing needs help understanding that families make different choices with different amounts. A child who's curious about your salary is often satisfied by the shape of it rather than the number: what comes in, what goes out for the mortgage and groceries and insurance, and what's left over.

You don't owe your children a number, and plenty of thoughtful families wait until their kids are older to share one. What matters more is that the question was welcome.

When you're trying to give them the childhood you didn't have

A lot of the parents we work with grew up with less than they have now. Many of them built what they have themselves, and the instinct that follows is close to universal: my kids are not going to worry about the things I worried about. That instinct deserves respect. It's also the one most worth watching. When you tell a child "we're choosing not to spend our money on that," a sharp 11-year-old will eventually do the math and understand you could have chosen otherwise fifty times over. At that point the tradeoff starts feeling like a rule you invented.

Lieber has a version of this, which he calls Dewey's rule: parents should try to arrange things so their kids end up, on average, around the 30th percentile of stuff compared with their peers. At Mana, we don't hand our clients a percentile to hit, but the idea underneath it holds up. Most of us didn't learn to handle money by being told how. We learned it by wanting things our parents weren't going to buy for us. You waited, you saved, you worked a job you didn't love. You learned it in the space between wanting something and having it.

The size of what you give your kids doesn't close that space. The automatic yes does.

You can fund the travel, the lessons, the tutor, the safe neighborhood, all of it, and still leave the gap open in smaller places. Your daughter can want the sneakers and put in half. Your son can want the newer phone and wait until his birthday. What your children spend matters much less than how often they have to do something about wanting.

This summer, my five-year-old wanted roller skates. We don't buy her whatever she asks for, so instead of saying no, I told her she could earn the money, and that whatever she earned, I would match into a savings account for her.

She settled on lemon bars. We baked them together, and she sold them at our town's movie night in the park, where she set up her stand, handed out free samples and sold out. The skates cost $60. She earned $80. She bought the skates, kept the extra $20 in savings, and I added another $80 on top.

The match was the part I cared about most. It works on a five-year-old for the same reason a 401(k) match works on the rest of us: it makes saving feel like the obvious move rather than the disciplined one.

She got the skates. She also got a summer of wanting them and a night of handing samples to strangers until the tray was empty.

Give Them Money to Practice With

Lieber makes a compelling case that allowance isn't primarily a reward. It's a teaching tool.

Think of it like giving a child books because you want them to become a reader, or a soccer ball because you want them to learn to play soccer. If we want children to become good at handling money, eventually they need some actual money to handle.

This is also where we'd update something from our original 2022 blog. We previously suggested connecting allowance to chores. Today, we'd separate the two. Kids should have responsibilities around the house because they are members of the family. They put away dishes, feed the dog or clean up their rooms because everyone contributes.

Allowance has a different job: it gives them a safe place to make financial decisions while the stakes are low. And making a few bad decisions is part of the point. If your seven-year-old spends every dollar they've saved on a toy that breaks two days later, you don't have to rescue them from the disappointment. A $14 regrettable purchase at age seven is an inexpensive lesson.

Parents do report a difference once kids have money of their own to manage. In the Acorns study, 59% of parents whose children have a savings or investment account said they'd noticed at least one positive change in their child's money habits. That's self-reported, and Acorns sells accounts for children, so we read it as directional.

Try the Spend, Save, Give System

For younger kids, Lieber recommends a beautifully simple system: three clear containers labeled Spend, Save and Give. Lieber's rule of thumb is roughly 50 cents to $1 per year of age per week, though we’d treat that as a starting point rather than a formula, and adjust for what your kid is expected to cover themselves. Clear containers work better than an app for the youngest kids, because the progress is visible. 

We love this because it teaches three completely different relationships with money:

• Spend teaches choice. What is worth using my money on?

• Save teaches patience. Is there something I want more than the thing in front of me right now?

• Give teaches generosity. What can my money do for someone besides me?

The magic is the ownership it gives them. As they get older, the jars become accounts.

What to Talk About at Every Age

Every child develops differently, so treat these as starting points.

Ages 3–5: Money buys things, and we can’t buy everything

Keep it concrete. Kids can begin understanding that things cost different amounts and that we choose what to buy. This is also the age to make digital money visible, since when kids see us tap a phone or card, it can look as though the machine simply gives us things.

Say what is actually happening:

"I'm using my card, but the money is still coming out of our bank account."

At the grocery store:

"We only need one cereal. Which one would you choose?"

When they want a toy:

"That's something you want. Food is something we need. We spend money on both wants and needs, but needs come first."

At this age, you're simply connecting money to choices.

Ages 6–9: Let them start making decisions

This is a great time to begin an allowance and a Spend/Save/Give system. Let your child choose something to save toward. Ideally, make the goal achievable within weeks or months, not years. A six-year-old doesn't need to save for college. They need to experience the satisfaction of wanting something, waiting and eventually getting there.

Some easy questions:

"Do you want this enough to use your own Spend money?"

"If you buy this today, how much longer will it take to reach your savings goal?"

"Is there something you'd like to use your Give money for?"

And when they make a decision you wouldn't make? Whenever possible, let them. Money judgment comes from practice, not from parents making every decision correctly on their behalf.

Ages 9–12: Talk about what’s trying to get their money

By this age, the conversation needs to expand beyond saving. Kids are comparing themselves with friends and seeing ads, YouTube videos, creators and brands constantly. This is where financial literacy becomes media literacy.

Two findings from the Acorns study belong here. 73% of kids believe becoming an influencer is a realistic path to wealth, while only 2.8% would trust an influencer to teach them about money. Our kids are absorbing a model of how wealth gets built from people they've already decided they don't believe. 

Ask:

"Why do you think that person is showing you that product?"

"Do you think they're being paid to recommend it?"

"Would you rather have $25 of virtual currency or $25 to spend on anything you wanted?"

That last one matters because kids are becoming fluent in digital spending early. Kids who buy digital goods average $23.60 a month, nearly $284 a year on things that exist only online. Plenty of those purchases are fine, as long as kids recognize them as spending.

This is also a great age to introduce investing: "When we buy a stock, we're buying a tiny piece of a company." Pick one they know and follow it together. Explain that investing is about letting money participate in the growth of businesses over time, rather than guessing which stock goes up tomorrow.

Ages 13–15: Introduce income, debt and investing

Now you can start talking more openly about income, taxes, bank accounts, debt and investing. If they earn money babysitting, walking dogs or at a first job, show them what happens to a paycheck When they use a debit card, teach them to look at the balance. If they encounter Buy Now, Pay Later, explain what it actually means:

"You're still paying the whole price. You're just borrowing the money and promising your future self will pay for it."

Ask:

"What would happen if you had five different monthly payments like that?"

This is also a good time to explain compound growth. You don't need a spreadsheet or a finance lecture. Pull up the free Investor.gov Compound Interest Calculator together and play with the numbers. What happens if you invest $25 a month starting at 15? What if you wait until 25? What if you increase it to $50? Let them change the assumptions and see for themselves what time can do for money.

We want a 15-year-old to hear words like interest, credit, investing and taxes and think, I know roughly what that means.

Ages 16+: Show them the numbers

Before kids leave home, they should see what adult life costs. Talk about rent, car insurance, groceries, health insurance, phone bills, taxes and college. If you're both comfortable with it, show them a real bill.

You can also let them manage a category themselves. Maybe you give your teenager a clothing budget for six months instead of buying individual items whenever they ask. Suddenly, one expensive pair of sneakers has a tradeoff.

If they're earning income, help them understand a Roth IRA and why starting young is so powerful. (Our post on how a 529 plan can create generational wealth for your children covers the bigger picture.)

Talk about credit before a credit card arrives: 

"A credit card isn't extra money. It is a convenient way to borrow for about 30 days. If you can't pay the whole thing off, it becomes expensive money." 

That's a lesson worth learning before freshman orientation.

One more to bookmark for a few years out. 3rd Decade is a nonprofit running a free financial education program for adults 18 to 40: eight classes totaling about 10 hours, then three one-on-one sessions with a volunteer financial mentor spread over two years. Finish it, open a Roth IRA, and they put $250 in it. There are income limits, which most 22-year-olds in a first job will meet. We'd rather a young adult learn this from a fiduciary-minded nonprofit than from whoever their algorithm serves up.

Tell Your Kids What Your Family Values

The most important money conversations end up being about what your family holds most important. Why do you spend a lot on some things and little on others? Why do you give money away?

"We've been fortunate, so giving some of it away to people and organizations we care about is something we believe in."

These are the conversations that build a family culture.

You Don't Need to Be Perfect With Money to Raise Kids Who Are Good With It

Parents sometimes avoid these conversations because they worry they'll say the wrong thing or expose their own past financial mistakes. You don't need to pretend; age-appropriate honesty can be powerful. "I didn't learn much about investing when I was younger, so I'm learning now." "I've bought things I regretted too." Being good with money is something you learn, and then keep learning.

The Acorns study found something encouraging amid all of the digital spending: 85% of kids still believe consistently saving money can build wealth over time. Our kids aren't a lost cause because they know more about Robux than Roth IRAs. They're curious, they're watching, and they're already forming beliefs about money.

Talk about it. Not perfectly, not all at once, and definitely not in a two-hour family meeting. At dinner. In the car. At the grocery store. When they make a mistake. The goal is to raise a person who understands that money is a tool, and who feels confident deciding how to use it to build a life they love.

The 2026 Acorns Money Matters Report for Kids surveyed 2,000 U.S. parents and one child ages 6–17 from each household. The online research was conducted by Opinium Research in July 2026. Ron Lieber's The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous, and Smart About Money was also used as a resource for this article.

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Stephanie Bucko and Cristina Livadary are fee-only financial planners based in Los Angeles, California. Stephanie is the Chief Investment Officer and Cristina is the Chief Executive Officer at Mana Financial Life Design (FLD). Mana FLD provides comprehensive financial planning and investment management services to help clients grow and protect their wealth throughout life’s journey. Mana FLD specializes in advising ambitious professionals who seek financial knowledge and want to implement creative budgeting, savings, proactive planning and powerful investment strategies. As fee-only fiduciaries and independent financial advisors, Stephanie and Cristina never receive commission of any kind. Stephanie and Cristina are legally bound by their certifications to provide unbiased and trustworthy financial advice.