Mother Goose was one of the few books I packed on our family’s Great African Adventure in Kenya in 1973.
Our firstborn son Erik was nearly 2 years old.
My husband Dennis was spending six months in charge of a Princeton scientific expedition in northwest Kenya, collecting data for his Ph.D. research. Erik and I joined Dennis during the last three months of the expedition.
I packed only what I could physically carry (there were no wheeled suitcases back then!) while still hanging somehow onto a toddler through the airports of Chicago, New York, London, and Nairobi.
I only brought clothes for Erik and me, a couple of toys, and a few essential books.
Mother Goose entertained us everywhere
Mother Goose amused us on planes, in hotels, in tents, and around campfires as we began our nomadic adventure.
In the first month, nearly every day was different. We drove through forests, mountains, and wildlife preserves, lumbered along beach roads, and lurched into the canyons and over the trackless plains of the desert in our four-wheel-drive truck.
?We stayed a few days here and a few days there.
During the second month, we lived in a tent in the North Kenyan desert next to a dry riverbed.
We followed that up by camping for the third month at another desert location near bleak cascades of high rock.
Mother Goose provided security.
For, no matter what changes we experienced, Mother Goose lent stability to our toddler’s day.
Every day, Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Little Jack Horner never failed to sit in a corner. And you could always count on the spider to sit down beside her and frighten Miss Muffet away.
Mother Goose enchanted our African neighbors from the Turkana tribe.
They were a people straight out of the pages of National Geographic. The women wore skirts made of goat skin and encased their necks in dozens of bead necklaces made from ostrich eggshells.
The men sported mud-pack hairdos and went naked except for a single length of cloth, which they usually wore slung under the left shoulder and tied at the right shoulder.
One afternoon I was reading Mother Goose aloud to Erik under a thorn tree.
A young Turkana tribesman wandered by and peeked over my shoulder at the pictures.
I let the young man take Mother Goose to the dining table, where he was soon joined by a bare-breasted teenage girl and two young male warriors carrying long spears.
It was a comical sight—
four half-naked Turkana seriously contemplating the pictures in Mother Goose, puzzling over the cat with his fiddle, solemnly discussing the cow jumping over the moon....
How I wished I could understand the Turkana language for just five minutes!
That copy of Mother Goose is long gone.
When it started falling to shreds, I bought another copy for our second child. And then I bought a third copy for child number three.
We seemed to wear out one Mother Goose per child.
Mother Goose helps lay an English language foundation
A bilingual kindergarten teacher told me that she always teaches her children Mother Goose rhymes because it helps them learn English.
Mother Goose ushers children into understanding and appreciating the English language. It is a foundation for later reading and writing.
The rhymes are easy to learn and fun to repeat.
Chanting them helps reinforce the meaning of the words. The absurd images stimulate a child’s imagination. The rhymes train their ears to hear phonemes.
The words' color and cadence introduce children to the sheer delight of language. The illustrations and rhymes lure children into an enjoyment of the world of books.
Later, I got to see the power of Mother Goose for a child from a non-reading family
Thirty years ago, 5-year-old Jacob started coming to our house every day during the summer while his mother worked.
When he first came, he had little interest in books and little patience for reading. But soon, he began sitting still for 20 or 30 minutes while we read to him.
For him, I bought our fourth copy of Mother Goose.
And today, with 13 grandchildren, I’ve kept on buying, and I’ve stopped counting.
I clearly remember the day that my financial education began.
It was 1956, and I was nine years old.
In our family of 5 kids, Dad doled out our allowances before church every Sunday. We each received a penny per year of age, so at that time, my allowance was 9 cents, and one penny went into the Sunday School offering plate.
But on that memorable day, Dad announced that he had increased my allowance to 40 cents a week.
I could hardly breathe. The news was so unexpected.
Then, Dad explained that I now my responsibilities would now increase along with my cash flow. He and Mom would buy my start-up school supplies as usual.
But after that, Dad explained, I would have to buy my paper, pencils and other school supplies throughout the school year.
I would also need to save –
to buy birthday and Christmas presents for the rest of the family or come up with the cash to get the new bike I wanted.
It made me feel suddenly grown up, in charge, loaded with money and responsibility.
But then of course, new problems also suddenly demanded solutions:
Which store sold paper cheaper? (I learned to scout for bargains, to do comparison shopping, to check the Sunday newspaper for local ads.)
And…what should I say to the freeloaders at school who asked to borrow my paper but never paid me back? Or asked to borrow pencils but never returned them?
Now that I had to take those losses myself, I learned the whys of ethics.
My parents showed me how to use my allowance to develop a plan for spending and saving, but as I grew older my wants (and even some of my needs) grew greater than my parents’ ability to increase my allowance.
So, I developed a babysitting clientele and used the money I earned to buy fashionable clothes, go to camp, and so on. I learned to sew and make crafts to stretch my gift money and increase my wardrobe for less money.
When a child’s income depends on what adults can be convinced to provide, the child tends to learn how to manage people instead of learning how to manage money.
On the other hand, a regular allowance can be a parent’s best tool for preparing children to manage large sums of money on their own one day.
The Consumer Credit Counseling Service at the El Paso YWCA gives these suggestions for teaching money management through a regular allowance:
Wait until your child is ready.
Kids under 8 or 9 may not have the patience to save money or the emotional readiness to make the decisions required for a simple saving and spending plan.
Figure out basic expenses.
Help your children keep track of the money they spend for two or three weeks and use that information to estimate how much they need.
Begin with a simple plan.
An envelope system often works well at first. Show children how to divide their allowance up into envelopes labeled for different purposes—savings, contributions for church or synagogue, lunch money, ongoing school supplies, fun money, etc. The younger the child, the fewer the responsibilities (and envelopes).
Decide together on a safe place to keep the envelopes and explain how important it is to take money from them only when needed.
Be consistent.
Children need a regular amount paid on the same day each week—or each month for older children—to learn how to plan. Learning to manage irregular amounts at irregular times is too complicated for children.
So, if the family income is irregular (and believe me, I’ve been there), when money comes in, parents need to set aside the total amount of allowance their child will need for the next several weeks to give it later on schedule.
Make adjustments as necessary.
When children ask for an increase in allowance, they should be able to make an account of how they spend their money now – but not to the penny. It’s reasonable for about 10 percent to be unaccounted for. After kids make an accounting, they can figure out with their parents whether the increase they want is for needs or wants. Then, make the decision based on need and family income.
Re-evaluate regularly as your child’s expenses and ability to handle responsibility increase.
Parents may increase a teenager’s allowance, for example, to include a clothing budget. Their teen is then responsible for buying their clothes and must make decisions about, for example, saving money ahead of winter to buy a winter coat and boots.
Responsible money management is a necessary survival skill. No child should leave home without it.
I don’t remember how old our daughter Jessica was, or what she did to make me think she needed correction. She was probably about six. All I remember is how shocked I was when my attempt to give a simple, logical consequence produced a shrieking melodrama.
Jessica’s allowance was twenty-five cents a week (back in about 1980), so I thought a reasonable penalty for misbehavior was a three-cent fine. It wouldn’t bankrupt her – just make her think twice next time, right?
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
When I told my little daughter she had to give me three of her pennies, she reacted like I’d told her I was going to chop off three of her fingers.
She wailed, she sobbed, she set the house vibrating with her grief.
It was genuine distress, too. She was not manipulating me —although I was afraid that if I handled the situation wrong, she’d learn to put on a show like this again next time when she wanted her way.
I also realized I’d misjudged Jessica’s maturity. She was bright. She could count money and she could make change. But, she was not cognitively ready to reason or emotionally ready to understand the meaning and value of 3 pennies. My consequence was not age-appropriate.
So I told her we could make some change. If she gave me a nickel, I’d give her two cents.
Her tears subsided, I gave her one coin, she got two coins back, and I postponed using fines for discipline until she was 9 or 10.
So, are you teaching your kids how to manage money?
Teaching children money management is an important part of good parenting, and it can start as early as preschool. But to successfully teach good financial habits, we need to understand what to teach and when. Here are a few suggestions from Consumer Credit Counseling Service at the El Paso YWCA for tailoring your teaching to children’s levels of emotional readiness and ability to reason:
Preschoolersare concrete thinkers.
They have trouble grasping abstract ideas like money, space and time. Since a nickel is bigger in size than a dime, preschoolers think it’s worth more. They need a simple experience buying items at the store. So, let them hand the money for purchases to the store clerk.
First and second-graders have trouble making choices and are still unrealistic about what money can buy.
It’s hard for them to understand that today's decisions bring consequences tomorrow.
So, give them a small amount to spend. Show them items they can buy with that amount. This helps train them to limit spending to a budgeted amount. Above all, don’t reward begging by giving in to it.
Third and fourth-graders benefit from receiving an allowance.
Doing simple price comparison problems with a pocket calculator is helpful for them, and so are parents’ explanations about the why of some of their family shopping choices.
Children this age also can begin running errands, first with an older brother or sister and then by themselves. They can take money in a change purse, and then buy one or two grocery items and bring back the change. These activities are an important step toward being able to shop independently in a few years.
Preteens usually like to shop and are ready to buy some of their own clothes.
Since preteens can handle greater responsibility, they can start earning money by doing odd jobs at home and elsewhere—which is fortunate because their activities with friends, hobbies, and school activities cost more. They can learn simple budgeting, saving, and even simple investing.
Teens feel a lot of social pressure to keep up with the crowd
They want to dress like their friends, do what their friends do, and have whatever “everybody else” has. They want to be independent and make their own decisions, but their financial dependence gets in their way.
Responsible independence is the goal. Teens can work on that with their parents. If they show responsibility for handling their allowance, increasing the amount to include a clothing budget is helpful. Teens are more likely to be reasonable about money issues if they have developed experience handling money responsibly since they were small, and if they understand the relationship between their spending and the family’s income.
Teaching kids wise money management is an essential goal of good parenting.
When kids learn to budget, save, and even invest before they leave home, it can prevent a world of trouble for them later in life in many areas, not just their finances.
My next blog will explore best practices for using a teen allowance to help teenagers become financially independent.
Mother Goose was one of the few books I packed on our family’s Great African Adventure in Kenya in 1973.
Our firstborn son Erik was nearly 2 years old.
My husband Dennis was spending six months in charge of a Princeton scientific expedition in northwest Kenya, collecting data for his Ph.D. research. Erik and I joined Dennis during the last three months of the expedition.
I packed only what I could physically carry (there were no wheeled suitcases back then!) while still hanging somehow onto a toddler through the airports of Chicago, New York, London, and Nairobi.
I only brought clothes for Erik and me, a couple of toys, and a few essential books.
Mother Goose entertained us everywhere
Mother Goose amused us on planes, in hotels, in tents, and around campfires as we began our nomadic adventure.
In the first month, nearly every day was different. We drove through forests, mountains, and wildlife preserves, lumbered along beach roads, and lurched into the canyons and over the trackless plains of the desert in our four-wheel-drive truck.
?We stayed a few days here and a few days there.
During the second month, we lived in a tent in the North Kenyan desert next to a dry riverbed.
We followed that up by camping for the third month at another desert location near bleak cascades of high rock.
Mother Goose provided security.
For, no matter what changes we experienced, Mother Goose lent stability to our toddler’s day.
Every day, Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Little Jack Horner never failed to sit in a corner. And you could always count on the spider to sit down beside her and frighten Miss Muffet away.
Mother Goose enchanted our African neighbors from the Turkana tribe.
They were a people straight out of the pages of National Geographic. The women wore skirts made of goat skin and encased their necks in dozens of bead necklaces made from ostrich eggshells.
The men sported mud-pack hairdos and went naked except for a single length of cloth, which they usually wore slung under the left shoulder and tied at the right shoulder.
One afternoon I was reading Mother Goose aloud to Erik under a thorn tree.
A young Turkana tribesman wandered by and peeked over my shoulder at the pictures.
I let the young man take Mother Goose to the dining table, where he was soon joined by a bare-breasted teenage girl and two young male warriors carrying long spears.
It was a comical sight—
four half-naked Turkana seriously contemplating the pictures in Mother Goose, puzzling over the cat with his fiddle, solemnly discussing the cow jumping over the moon....
How I wished I could understand the Turkana language for just five minutes!
That copy of Mother Goose is long gone.
When it started falling to shreds, I bought another copy for our second child. And then I bought a third copy for child number three.
We seemed to wear out one Mother Goose per child.
Mother Goose helps lay an English language foundation
A bilingual kindergarten teacher told me that she always teaches her children Mother Goose rhymes because it helps them learn English.
Mother Goose ushers children into understanding and appreciating the English language. It is a foundation for later reading and writing.
The rhymes are easy to learn and fun to repeat.
Chanting them helps reinforce the meaning of the words. The absurd images stimulate a child’s imagination. The rhymes train their ears to hear phonemes.
The words' color and cadence introduce children to the sheer delight of language. The illustrations and rhymes lure children into an enjoyment of the world of books.
Later, I got to see the power of Mother Goose for a child from a non-reading family
Thirty years ago, 5-year-old Jacob started coming to our house every day during the summer while his mother worked.
When he first came, he had little interest in books and little patience for reading. But soon, he began sitting still for 20 or 30 minutes while we read to him.
For him, I bought our fourth copy of Mother Goose.
And today, with 13 grandchildren, I’ve kept on buying, and I’ve stopped counting.
©2020 Becky Cerling Powers, updated 2024
Reprint this post with attribution only www.beckypowers.com
Reprinted from Sticky Fingers, Sticky Minds: quick reads for helping kids thrive