If you’re going to raise and educate a financially independent adult, you need to start early and practice often.
You’ve likely already acquainted yourself with everything you need to do to help your learner with unique needs succeed in saving, budgeting, and shopping. But have you given any thought to navigating banking services?
Knowing how to understand banking services is essential but it’s a logistics that very few educators and parents think carefully about. You know how to walk into a bank and deposit a check – but does your child?
Here’s what you need to know to help your son, daughter, or student successfully understand and navigate banking services.
Make it Developmentally Appropriate
You can start talking about banking services with kids as young as first or second grade, but the key to being successful is making your talks productive and developmentally appropriate.
Note that we said developmentally appropriate and not age-appropriate. While some students may be able to grasp key banking vocabulary and concepts from a young age, for others, you may not be able to really delve into the meat of the topic until they’re in ninth or tenth grade. Keep your student’s age and cognitive level in mind when you’re planning out your instruction.
That said, you can start quite young with most children, beginning with basic conversations about how banks operate and the kinds of services they provide. You can use prebuilt academic lessons to acquaint them with these topics or you can do things more organically by throwing in a brief explanation here every time you take your son or daughter with you to the bank.
Teach Basic Banking Vocabulary
Start by explaining to your child the ins and outs of banks – including why we need them. What are the benefits of using a bank versus, say, a piggy bank for keeping spare change and extra cash?
Explain to your child that banks help people organize their funds into accounts so that they can safely store large amounts of money that is protected from thieves and other wrongdoers. You can also show your child how banks can help when it comes to paying bills, storing paychecks, and earning a small amount of interest.
As you progress with your child and teach more about banking services, you can teach them more complicated concepts. Start with the basic concepts surrounding savings and checking accounts, then move on to more challenging, abstract ideas like compound interest, credit accounts, and loans.
You will want to vary the difficulty level of your banking vocabulary instruction based on the age and again, the developmental and cognitive level of your child. While you may be able to get into complex topics like mortgages, variable interest rates, and more with some of the most cognitively advanced students, others may not be able to grasp these concepts and should stick with more elementary ideas like savings accounts.
Make Faux Deposit Slips and Checks
Bringing your child to an actual bank to show them the ins and outs of various banking services is a great way to showcase exactly what a bank does. However, for some students with unique needs, this might be challenging. Going to a new location can be stressful, as can changing up a routine or introducing new faces or concepts.
You can reduce stress and make things a bit more manageable by starting at home or school. You can create your own faux banking set-up to imitate what might happen at a bank and to go through the social exchanges that might occur there.
Using social stories is a great way to introduce your child to banking. Another easy way to do so is by making up some fake deposit slips, checks, and other documents that might be necessary at a bank. That way, the two of you can walk through the exchanges that might occur at the bank so that your child is prepared for whatever might happen.
Just be sure to explain that these materials are not real and should not be used at a bank – you don’t want to get in trouble for counterfeiting, after all!
Tap into FDIC Programs
There are all kinds of websites out there that are dedicated to improving the financial literacy of young adults and even fully grown adults. For example, The Mint does a great job of explaining how banks work and why they are important for all people.
There are also various resources offered by financial heavyweights like the FDIC that will prove to be invaluable as you are teaching your child about banking services. The FDIC Money Smart for Young Adults program offers numerous lesson plans, exercises, and even videos that can be used to teach a young one about banking.
These lessons and activities are broken up and categorized by grade level. You may have to do some digging to find the one that best suits your objective and the ability level of your student, but this website is a gold mine for teaching about banking services before you ever even step foot inside a bank.
Have a Family Banking Day
Another easy way to teach about banking is to designate one day a week or month as the family banking day. While banking should be an everyday part of your functioning as a household – you can start with simple tasks like stashing coins in a coin jar or writing down expenditures on a list on the fridge – you can also get the family involved when you need to make a trip to the bank.
It can be stressful to tow along children when you’re trying to cross items off your to-do list, like making a deposit or meeting with a loan officer. However, whenever it’s possible and prudent, bring your child along so that they can see exactly what goes on at a bank. The more often you can do this, the better, as it will help show your child that the bank is not a scary place – and instead, a fun place to go.
Some tasks you can do with your child include:
- Using the ATM
- Opening up a savings or checking account
- Depositing or withdrawing money
- Cashing a check
- Ordering new checks
- Using a debit card and entering a PIN
- Closing down a new account or transferring money
- Rolling change and then depositing it
Teach How to Troubleshoot
Once you’ve established a routine in taking your child with you to the bank, it will be much easier to teach them about how to troubleshoot various things that can happen when you are utilizing banking services.
This is perhaps one of the most valuable things you can do as a parent or educator when it comes to improving a child’s financial literacy. Problem solving skills don’t come naturally to most, so it’s vital that you teach some strategies to help your child with unique needs thrive in a more challenging situation.
For example, it can be helpful to teach a child how to respectfully and effectively solve common banking mistakes, like when money is taken out of your account that you did not spend.
Learn About Checks & Balances
Another fun activity you can do with your child is to teach them how to balance a checkbook.
True, this isn’t something that everybody continues to do or even needs to do in the modern world of online banking. However, it’s still a skill that can be helpful, particularly when you are first getting used to how making deposits and withdrawals actually work.
Set Savings Goals
Although this is a topic that we delved more deeply into in our guide on saving, it’s also something that goes hand-in-hand with navigating banking services. Have a candid conversation with your child about what savings goals they might have. Knowing these goals will give you both something to work toward so that going to the bank and utilizing banking services isn’t quite as scary – and is a more enjoyable process overall.
Go Digital
In your journey to educate your child about banking services, don’t forget about those that are offered online. Online banking is here to stay, and knowing how to navigate online banking services is vital when it comes to being a financially successful and independent young person.
Teach your child everything from how to check a balance at the ATM, how to log in to an online account, and how to change passwords for online bank accounts (something that should be done on a regular basis).
Look Into Services Offered By Your Bank
Many banks offer their own educational programs for young people. After all, they stand to gain quite a bit by teaching young adults and children how banking services work – they want to get future customers!
Check with your bank to see if there are options available for kids to learn more about banking. Many offer training days as well as child-friendly checking and savings accounts.
The easiest way to teach your child with unique learning needs about banking is to normalize the banking process so that it’s not only less scary, but also enjoyable. Make banking practices a regular part of your weekly routine as a family or ingrain it into classroom education, and you’ll find that it begins to come just as naturally as using other services (like grocery stores and gas stations) over time.
Further Reading
- The Mint: How Banks Work
- FDIC: The Learning Bank – The FDIC’s Webpage for Students, Teachers, and Parents
- National Financial Educators Council: Multiple Advantages to Teaching Kids About Banking