She was driving well past the speed limit. She got pulled over. She got a stiff fine. And this young teenager’s response? “I’m so angry at my parents! They expect me to pay for this ticket. It’s just not fair!”
I’m sure she had better things to spend the money on. Clothes, cell phone accessories, itunes for her ipod. All the essentials for a teenager. Summer is coming to end and several kids have gotten their first jobs and are about to taste the part of reality that I’m still learning myself. Juggling three or four responsibilities and carrying a job all at the same time. With school, sports, time for friends and so on, how in the world will they have time to work? But without work, how in the heck will they get all the finer things that their friends have? For most teens, that’s the only thing having a job is good for: to feed their raving appetite to buy more stuff.
THE THINGS TEENAGERS WILL DO FOR $
I’ve seen teens give hundreds of dollars to the church and others spend thousands of dollars on stuff that’s equally valued to belly-button lint. Either way, spending the money is what made them feel good. It’s what all people do, not just teenagers, to find happiness. (I find it quite comical when people say money can’t buy you happiness. When I bought my daughter the new Dora The Explorer movie, I got pretty happy when she screamed “DORA!!!!!” and then hugged and kissed me.) Sure, the joy of earning and spending the money from the first job is great. But too many parents hand off the financial responsibilities to their kids without helping them understand the depth of the danger they could face if they’re not careful. “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, in their eagerness to get rich, have wandered away from the faith and caused themselves a lot of pain.”-1 Tim. 6:10.
In this day and age, parents have no choice but to make their kids get a job due to the hurting economy. But if we make our kids get jobs, we should also have restrictions on what they should be spending it on. Granted it’s their hard earned money, but they’re young teenagers that have an obsession with spending. I was talking to a young teenage girl today who is working two jobs, and she told me that she’s only responsible to buy her new clothes after her parent buy her her school clothes, and to pay for gas. I asked her why she has to have two jobs to do that and she told me she LOVES to buy new clothes. With today’s adults defined as the Credit Card generation, and dept being higher then ever, we should see the spending trends of our kids and make sure they understand stewardship and wisdom. They should learn from our mistakes. But we can’t expect them to learn by watching. Because all they’re seeing is the crazy spending habits that is behind the reason some of our kids have to get jobs.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
TEENS AND MONEY
Posted by Jo-Jo Spencer at 6:53 PM
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
It's obvious we need to do a better job teaching people about money. I've done some work with Junior Achievement. They have a lot of programs in this area. Here's their site, for anyone who is interested www.ja.org.
I think it is crazy that they are both drinking starbucks coffees that are probably $5 a pop. Yikes! I think there is a certain Paris Hilton image that some girls really desire to have, and if that means stealing money from a nine year old to buy a purse or new clothes they will do it. Keep on writting JoJo I love reading it!
I didn't even think about them drinking the starbucks. That's so classic. When I worked at Caribou, I'd always hear form customers how bad they were stuggling because the economy, then they'd by a $4.50 drink EVERYDAY! Amazing. Thanks for the words of encouragement too. Praying for you and your family quite often
If you interested in teaching your kids about working with money responsibly, Junior Achievement has a great free site. You should check it out http://studentcenter.ja.org/.
Post a Comment