INFO for Families

Do Your Kids Expect to Get Paid for Work Around the House?

Reconciling the desire to bless your kids with the possibility that you will spoil them is a challenge for every parent. How does one strike a healthy balance?

Carey Nieuwhof has written a couple of articles on the Orange Parents site that deal with our culture's tendency to think we deserve what we have.

Read Five Ways to Fight Entitlement to learn how to raise kids who appreciate both what they work for and what they are given.

Before we get too "high and mighty" as parents, you can read his later post, called Entitled Parents. It confronts you and me on our belief that we have a right to have all the trappings of the American dream.

Careful consideration of his insights will hopefully turn our hearts toward becoming more grateful for God's blessings in our life and more generous in what we do with them.

Hope for Our Financial Future???

The following is a guest post by Chris Trent, Middle School Pastor at Johnson Ferry Baptist Church in Marietta, GA. You can follow Chris on Twitter at @ChrisTrent.

Check out this article from the folks over at Fuller Youth Institute. Are things looking up for the way teenagers think about money? It looks like there may be a shift in thinking.

How Kids Think About Money

What are You Going to Skip This Year?

Here's a great 60-second video from skip1 featuring Francis Chan. Skip1 is an organization founded on the simple challenge for us to skip something in order to save money to feed those who are starving.

 

So what are you going to skip this year? What of the many luxuries you enjoy could you do without for a day, a week, or longer? Perhaps your entire family could do without something and move those dollars towards a worthwhile ministry. 

Watch this video as a family, then talk about it. And start praying about possibilities. World Vision is always a good place to start.

Teaching Your Kids About Money

"Money doesn't grow on trees."

"Do you think I'm made of money?"

"Get a job."

These are a few of the best comebacks I have to offer to my kids when they ask for money. While they may be true, they do very little to help my kids to realize both the value of money and the way economics work in our world.

Even telling them that a surprisingly high number of people in our world live on just a few dollars a day doesn't do much to impact their thinking. It's not their fault that we are living in a material world. (And it's not my fault that a Cindy Lauper song is now stuck in your head.)

The truth is that if our kids are going to gain a healthy...and a Biblical...view of money, then we are the ones who need to teach them.

I can remember a few years ago when we were tightening up our budget a bit. I got a hundred one dollar bills in a big stack. Then I used construction paper to write the names of a couple dozen of the key categories of our budget. Then we gathered the kids around the dining room table and began to show where the money goes. It was eye-opening for the kids.

There's a great article that U.S. News published that gives a few tips to help you to educate your kids on money. It's called Four Ways to Teach Your Kids Financial Responsibility by Doug Lockwood. Give it a quick read and pray for God to give you some fresh ideas to teach your own kids.

Giving Your Home and Stuff Meaning

In spite of a troubled economy and various economic woes, I would venture to guess that everybody who is currently reading this is quite wealthy. If you have a home and a car and electricity and high speed internet, you are very well off indeed.

If you don't believe me, I recommend a neat little website called GlobalRichList.com. You put in your annual income and it tells you where you stack up when compared to the rest of the planet. My experience is that it's hard to gripe when you find out that your income puts you in the top 1 or 2% wealthiest people in the world.

So it serves us well to get the occasional reminder: God doesn't give us the blessings of material things so that we can build a collection of stuff to enjoy. He blesses us with stuff so that we might be a blessing to others. We aren't owners...we are stewards of God's stuff.

Which begs a serious question: "How are you leveraging the home and stuff God gave you for His glory?"

Don Miller wrote on this subject on his blog last week. You should read it.

How to Give Your Home and Your Stuff Meaning 

Can The Recession Save Marriage?

The recession has brought a new dimension of stress to most everybody's life. We feel it at work and at home. If your marriage is typical, you probably find yourself arguing about money and debt and savings more than every before.

But while none of us enjoys tightening the family budget or the stress of an unstable economy, some studies are showing that the recession is actually strengthening the marriage bond. Bradford Wilcox of the Institute for American Values writes in a Wall Street Journal editorial piecethat the divorce rate has actually dropped during the recession. It makes for a thought-provoking read.

Perhaps his most notable theory is that we are moving away from an overly-romanticized view of marriage ("you're my soul-mate") to a more practical one. While we all appreciate the passion and emotion that comes from an intimate marriage, we must realized that the strength of our homes must not be based solely upon it. Instead, we must see it as a byproduct of a strong commitment to do life together and face whatever the world throws our way. To use a Biblical reference, the "leave and cleave" commitment comes before the fun part of "becoming one flesh."

Please give me some feedback on this one. 

What have you seen in your friends and family that reflects this trend? Are the marriages around you getting stronger or weaker during the recession? How have job losses affected the marriages you see? Is the trend of living more frugally improving or hurting relationships? Talk amongst yourselves...