Jayne Dowle: Wealth of experience children can learn from

Imagining a bunch of seven-year-olds sweating over their piggy banks, I was tending towards sympathy until I read further into the findings of this new survey and discovered that it was adults in their late 20s and early 30s who were complaining.

According to Axa insurance, more than half of this age group feel that their parents let them down by failing to prepare them for the adult responsibilities of budgeting, debt, mortgages, savings, pensions and so on.

I thought this lot were supposed to be the tech-savvy generation, plugged in, switched on, aware of their rights and not afraid to shout about them. Honestly, it has never been easier to learn how to manage your own money.

There are advice websites, comparison sites, a government-backed money advice service, apps for every smartphone and television programmes dedicated to telling people how to earn it, spend it wisely and save it.

With all this information at their fingertips, there really is no excuse for such ineptitude, and blaming the parents is a bit pathetic.

Then again, knowing what I know about parenting, I can imagine that there are plenty of parents who must share 
the blame.

These will be the ones who feel that they are doing the kindest thing by protecting their precious ones from the horrible reality of earning a living and balancing the books, and therefore let them grow up without a financial clue.

These are the parents who won’t allow their teenagers to take a part-time job in case it messes with their A-level studies, who order their student offspring a weekly online supermarket shop and get it delivered to their door, who provide credit cards and mobile phone contracts and would be quite happy to let their adult sons and daughters live at home until they are 40, buying their toothpaste for them and cooking their tea, whether they could afford to buy their own home or not.

Forgive me if I sound harsh, but I’ve been earning since I was 13 so I haven’t got much patience for this kind of whingeing. And, I’ve got to admit my own attitude to financial management has been far from exemplary over the years. There have been highs and lows, but I’ve learnt to take responsibility for myself, because that’s what grown-ups do.

Yet even in my profligate 20s, when I’d maxed out the credit cards or gone over my overdraft limit, I would never have dreamed of blaming my prudent mother, who still sits down with her till receipts and checks every single item off when she comes home from the shops.

I’ve also been as susceptible as the next person to the hard sell, which is how my husband and I once ended up with an endowment mortgage we had no chance of paying off. Guided by sound advice from the personal finance pages of a newspaper, we tackled the company responsible, got out of the deal, and got compensation as well.

This experience taught me that the world is a very dangerous and nasty place, especially when it comes to trusting other people with your money. We were lucky, but thousands of people aren’t, like those stuck with mortgages they can’t afford as a legacy of the years when lenders trusted borrowers to be honest about their earnings and what they could afford to repay.

All of us have been through a complete firestorm of personal finance this past decade or so. If scandal after scandal – dodgy mortgages, worthless pensions and mis-sold PPI, to name just a few – doesn’t teach us to watch our backs, I don’t know what will.

This is where I do manage to find a bit of sympathy. As personal finance has become so terrifying, it is no wonder that young people simply switch off. When they say they don’t understand it, perhaps it’s because they can’t even begin to understand it. That is why bringing personal finance lessons into schools are a good idea. There will be a limit to what youngsters can usefully learn, as no-one knows the true meaning of overspending until the cashpoint swallows your card, but anything which makes them develop financial acumen has got to be a good thing.

I can’t begin to imagine what my own children are learning about money, living with me. I just hope the fact that we still have a roof over our heads proves that at least I’m doing something right. If they ask for my advice though, I will tell them this; when it comes to personal finance, there is one big clue. It’s in the word “personal”. Whatever we’re taught, and however we learn it, what is right for one person may be wrong for another. It is our responsibility as parents to equip our children not with all the answers, but with the means of working them out.