The Birds and Bees, But Make it Money
The slight weirdness of talking about money with a teenager
My son was three years old, hyper verbal and always (ALWAYS) curious. One day he wanders into the bathroom while I’m peeing and politely asked me where my penis was. I explained to him that my body doesn’t have a penis and that bodies like mine have vaginas instead (an oversimplification, yes, but remember: he was three). He considered this for a moment and then asked if Tessa, a friend at daycare, had a vagina. I said I believed she did. How about our neighbor Ellie? Yes, I thought she probably did as well. He paused and then his eyes lit up: What about teacher Sheri? Did his beloved teacher Sheri have a vagina? I said yes and he gleefully clapped his hands together and exclaimed “Oh man! I CAN’T WAIT to tell her tomorrow!1”
(Bless early childhood educators who no doubt get told all manner of information from three year olds)
By the time we’d had this interaction, I already knew that there was never going to be a big “birds and bees” conversation with my son. I’ve always thought that whole “awkward parent sits embarrassed preteen kid down to tell them about sex for the first time” was a tired cliché, something best left to 1980s sitcoms. Thankfully, my particular kid was the perfect kind of kid for my preferred approach2: lots conversations throughout his childhood, led by his questions, giving him information in small doses that made sense for his age and developmental stage. He’s 15 now and we’ve covered a lot of ground, from body parts to the ethics of porn and the importance of enthusiastic consent. I think I’ve only blushed my way through one conversation, when he was about 10 years old and had a sincere and largely logistical question about the particular mechanics of a sex act; we survived my explanation, which involved a fair amount of vague hand gesturing and stopped just short of needing a diagram.
I feel like I (and my husband) have pretty much gotten the job done so far when it comes to making sure our kid knows how his body works, how to keep himself and his future partners safe, and how to develop a set of values that feels right for him when it comes to sex, bodies, and relationships. But lately I’ve started to wonder if there is another set of potentially uncomfortable conversations I’ve been ignoring.
Is there a “birds and bees” equivalent to talking about money?
***
I have LOTS of feelings about talking about money. I used to teach personal finance and financial literacy classes. I’ve talked to thousands of parents about the financial realities of going to college. I firmly believe that not talking about money only hurts people who don’t have generational wealth. I love talking about money.
But while I’ve been open about a lot of money topics, I think I’ve also been holding out a little on my own kid.
A few nights ago, my son and I were talking and he mentioned he’d been visiting college websites and using their net price calculators to try to figure out if he might be able to afford to attend there. Now, net price calculators are an imprecise tool at best, but it also turned out that my son was entering in wildly inaccurate information for some of the fields, so the cost estimates he was getting were functionally useless.
As I started to explain to him why all of his estimates where wrong, I realized that of course they were wrong. I’ve never actually told him the real numbers he needs to know to run those kind of calculators.
We’ve had plenty of conversations about money as he’s grown up. He knows how interest works and the basics of mortgages. He knows credit card debt is bad and student loan debt is probably inevitable. He’s helped me organize receipts for doing taxes and watched me balance my checkbook. He’s got a job and a savings account and a developing sense of ethics about money3… he’s certainly better educated about money than I was at his age.
We’ve also had some preliminary conversations about money in the college context. He knows that he won’t qualify for a Pell Grant or for the Minnesota State Grant program due to our family income. He knows that community colleges are his most affordable option. He knows the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition. He knew, vaguely, that he had a 529 plan but that I didn’t start it until after I’d finished paying off my own student loans, which was a pandemic era accomplishment.
I realized that I, like so many families I’ve worked with about college planning, had never actually told him directly how much financial support he could expect from his father and me. I’ve never told him the actual numbers when it comes to my salary and our assets that he’ll someday see on his FAFSA.
A note about that: I’ve worked with A LOT of families who are in the college planning mode in the last 20+ years and it is fairly common that parents do not want their kid to see their FAFSA info and don’t want their kids to know how much money their parents make. There were even some parents who refused to fill out the FAFSA at all, rather than give their kid access to their income information. Money really is the last taboo topic, I think.
I stayed up late after the net price calculator conversation with my son and ran some financial projections (never let it be said that I don’t know how to have a good time). I looked at his 529 and calculated how much might be in there if we continue to make our automatic monthly deposit for the next 29 months. I looked at our savings account and thought about how much I could take out of it before I’d have to start breathing into a paper bag. I calculated how large of a monthly payment to a college business office we could make if stay in my current job (and then promptly started worrying that I’m going to get fired despite the fact that there is nothing to suggest that is a possibility)(shut up, brain, it’s going to be fine).
I eventually came up with a number that, assuming all goes well in the next few years, we’d be able to commit to giving my son for each of his first four years of college.
(Beyond year four, he’s on his own. His sister will start college then and so she’ll get the annual college allotment instead, assuming she opts to go to college).
The next day, I shared the number with my husband and then with my son. I also sat down with him and showed him a net price calculator that had my actual salary and a correct estimate of our assets.
Like a lot of things, it felt more awkward in theory than in practice.
I’m still not fully clear about why I was hesitant to tell him my salary in the first place. I’m proud of my career and I have a salary that is competitive for my field… but my field is higher education. I both make more and less than people might expect, given where I am in my career. I think I wasn’t sure if my son would attach some meaning to my salary. Would he wonder why it wasn’t higher? If it was higher than he expected, would he wonder why there wasn’t more money in his college fund? Does a 15 year old have enough of a frame of reference to know what it means to make $45,000 versus $82,000 versus $114,000?
At the heart of it was perhaps a deeper question: is he proud of me? Does he value how hard I work? There are plenty of issues with using salary as evidence of how hard and valuable my labor is — plenty of smart, hardworking people make less money than I do and some real worthless jackholes make more.
It’s hard to wrap up all my values around labor (there is no such thing as unskilled labor; there is no moral way to be a billionaire), work (working hard is a choice and choices have consequences, good and bad), and money (tax the rich, tax corporations, spend less than you make, no matter what you make) and somehow have that embedded into telling him my salary number without wondering if I’m leaning more proud or defensive.
His reaction of “okay, cool” isn’t exactly illuminating in terms of what meaning he might be making out of that number.
After I told my son my salary, he asked a few other questions. How much money do we make every month? How big are my paychecks? When I had student loans, how much were the payments? How much is our mortgage payment? I answered all his questions and wondered if I should caution him about not sharing that information with his friends (because, surely, there is nothing 15 year olds love to talk about more than their parent’s monthly mortgage obligation).
Ultimately I decided not to tell him to keep it a secret.
Partially this is because there is a non zero chance that he promptly forgot all the numbers as soon as the conversation was over. But mostly, I think secrets are usually about one of two things: shame or safety. I don’t want him to think talking about money is shameful and I don’t want him to think that not talking about money makes us safer.
Thankfully it turns out that it was easier to talk about all of this than it was to explain what “scissoring” is to a 10 year old, so it appears that I really peaked early when it comes to awkward conversations with my son.
I know we’ll have to keep talking about our financial situation as college looms closer. I may have to update the number I gave my son for how much financial support he can expect. I’ve already told him that he has to apply to at least one community college and one in-state public university in addition to his current crop of out-of-state choices. I want him to be able to compare the costs of all those choices after any merit aid gets added to the mix so he can see how far our contribution will stretch at each institution. Ultimately I think we’ll all be glad that we had the big money conversation before he was in the midst of having to make one of the most expensive choices of his life.
Now my job is just to make sure I don’t get fired in the next three years.
(SHUT UP, BRAIN)
As with all posts that involve my kids, I showed this one to my son first for his approval. No teenagers were emotionally harmed in the writing of this post, even if they might low key think there is something vaguely cringe about their mom trying to be a writer.
In true second kid fashion, my daughter hates all discussions of anything related to bodies and puberty. Those second kids are really good at making sure we stay humble about our parenting prowess.
He recently asked me to help him make a financial donation and I was so proud of him, both for wanting to give his own money and for surviving my lecture about how to vet charities and what a program expense ratio is.
My daughter is in the AVID program, a thing I know very little about tbh, other than that they do an EXCELLENT job of Real Talk financial education, particularly when it comes to college. They recently did a project in class comparing the attendance cost for the top 5 colleges attended by graduates of her HS (just because I think it's interesting, they are University of North Texas, UT Dallas, Texas Tech, University of Arkansas, & University of Oklahoma).
As a single mom to an only child, I feel an extra urgency for my daughter to know as much as possible about my/our financial situation since if/when something happens to me, she will be neck deep in it whether she wants to be or not.
Still, from talking to her, I have my doubts that any kid bringing home a $150 paycheck from their $9/hr job can, as you said, even contemplate the difference between $25K and $50K...like those are both pretty much made up numbers to her? Still necessary, though! I do think breaking it down into monthly payments helps quite a bit, but again, they don't really think in terms of monthly income vs. monthly expenses yet.
I also think hiding finances from kids helps create the issue many people our age complain about when hiring young people, which is that they expect an unreasonable salary/standard of living right out of the gate. How are they supposed to know what to expect if there's no openness about how much someone with 20+ years of experience is making/able to save?
Anyway, great post! I am also not at ALL confident I could adequately explain scissoring to ANYONE, much less a 10-year-old; YOU ARE A HERO lol.
Thank you for telling us what the position was. I thought for sure it would be 69, because I was a jerk in college who would pretend to not know what it was until some poor fool (once my brother!) drew me a picture.
I also love that you are talking about money. We just bought our first house six months ago and are very open about how much it cost, what our mortgage is, with everyone. I have also been forthcoming about the taxes we unexpectedly owe this year, because there shouldn't be any shame.