Are parents in the UAE struggling to teach their kids about money?

We are raising our kids to leave us. That sounds terrible, I know!

 We hope that by the time that happens they are independent thinkers and doers, can decide between right and wrong, and perhaps maybe even manage their own finances. Yet how much of all these lessons are we really teaching them effectively?

 Born in India and then raised between India and then the Middle East, I was lucky to split my teenage years growing up between two very different countries. Life in India was a constant struggle of some sort every day. Not necessarily in a bad way. Struggles, negotiations, decisions- were just weaved into the fabric of everyday life, and I just went through the motions developing my resilience muscle along the way. Life here in the UAE was a stark contrast, even back then. The safety and security here reduced most of life’s friction I was used to. But hey, that’s why we live in the UAE right? To provide our families with a more comfortable life.

 My parents did a great job raising us kids, however, in all the life lessons I learned in my teenage years, taught, or absorbed, money wasn’t really a topic often discussed. Neither and home, nor at school and not even among my close friends. What was very clear was that work begets money and if that work or career happened to be that of a doctor, lawyer or engineer life would be comfortable and just fine!

 What was not clear was stuff like how much should one save, when should one start saving, what were good money habits and bad money habits, what is the difference between good debt and bad debt, how do I budget my finances effectively and so on. Information was harder to access and if your friends were equally clueless, you probably spent your twenties not saving (enough) and certainly not investing anything you saved.

 Fast forward to today, where the internet is in the air we breathe, and all our money questions are just a Google search away. However, parents are still struggling. Shouldn’t access to information simply be the solution? It seems like the answer is no.

 In research conducted by Cashee in early 2021 in the UAE with over 250 parents, what was clear is that parents were largely responsible for imparting money attitudes to their kids and not educational institutions. However, what surprised me was that only 60% of the parents interviewed thought money-management was in the top 5 most important life skills for their children. If parents don’t consider money management as a foundational life skill, there’s a possibility their children will, until a certain age, most likely adopt the same attitude on the subject. But if you do and your problem is more around “I don’t know how to teach” or “I don’t have much time” or that “My kids don’t listen to me”, then these are very valid concerns most parents have.

 When asked questions around what they were teaching, the topics most were comfortable with were “Saving” and “Value of Money” but topics like “Investing/growing money” or “Budgeting” fell below 50% and additional topics like Cryptocurrencies were below 10%.

 So to me, this is not very different from how I was taught about money growing up. Every now and then being advised to save money or being told “don’t spend too much!” or even an occasional “money doesn’t grow on trees you know!”. Have things changed at all? Have they gotten worse?

 What is clear to me as we are gearing up to launch Cashee and speaking to teens and parents is that we are trying to solve a real problem families face. The most common question I get from the parents we've spoken to is “Why wasn’t an app such as this around when I was growing up?” in reference to the lessons on money they weren't taught and the time they believed they lost in their younger days.

Let's hope our kids are not saying the same thing 20 years from now.