Nobody taught me anything about money. Not my parents, not the school in Gordon Town, not anybody who was in a position to sit me down and explain how the thing actually worked. I grew up like most Jamaican kids in that era: money was something adults stressed about quietly, and children were kept far from the conversation. The result was that when I had my first child in 2003, I was still living hand to mouth. No savings. No investments. No framework. Just income and expenses and the space between them slowly eating everything.

What Silence About Money Actually Teaches

When parents never discuss money with their children, they do not protect them from financial stress. They just delay it, and send them into adulthood completely unprepared to handle it. The child grows up, gets their first job, gets their first real expense, and has no language for any of it. No concept of assets versus liabilities. No understanding of why the thing you bought last month is already worth less than you paid for it. No instinct for the difference between a want and a need.

The silence felt like protection. What it actually was, was a form of ignorance being passed down. Not from cruelty. From custom. From parents who were themselves never taught, repeating the only pattern they knew.

I was that child. And then I became that adult. And I decided, when Avi came along, that the cycle was going to stop with me.

The Abundance Mindset Is Not About Money

The way we protect Avi from financial anxiety is not by hiding our finances from her. It is by surrounding her with a mindset of abundance.

Abundance does not mean unlimited. It does not mean she gets everything she asks for. It means she understands that resources exist, that they can be created, and that her relationship with them is something she has agency over. When she asks for something, we ask her three questions. Why do you want this? Why do you want it now? What is your contribution towards it?

Those three questions do more work than any lesson I could sit her down and deliver. They teach her to examine desire. They teach her that receiving something is connected to understanding it. They teach her that she is not a passive recipient of whatever money allows or does not allow. She is a participant.

And if she does not get the thing she asked for, she already understands it is not because the money does not exist. It is because the case was not strong enough, or the timing was not right, or the want was actually just instant gratification wearing the mask of a need.

Books at the Breakfast Table

Avi has financial literacy books in her space. Not because I sat her down and said we are doing a lesson today. Just because they are there. Books that explain assets and liabilities in language a child can hold. Books that talk about what you own versus what owns you.

She asks questions. I answer them honestly. Not with the full complexity of adult financial reality, but with enough truth that she is building a real picture. She knows the difference between something that puts money in your pocket and something that takes it out. That is not a small thing to know at her age.

Where to Draw the Line

The line is not about information. Children can handle more information than we give them credit for. The line is about anxiety.

There is a difference between telling a child the honest shape of your financial life and making a child feel responsible for it. One builds financial intelligence. The other builds childhood anxiety that follows them into adulthood as a complicated relationship with money and security.

A child does not need to know the exact numbers. They do not need to feel the weight of the mortgage or the pressure of the month end. But they do need to understand that resources are real, that choices have consequences, and that financial intelligence is something you build deliberately, not something you either have or you do not.

What I wish someone had given me was not protection from the reality of money. It was the language to understand it. That is what I am giving Avi. Not a shield. A vocabulary.

"Financial peace is not the acquisition of stuff. It is learning to live on less than you make."

Dave Ramsey