How I help my children understand the cost of living rises

As parents, we often have to explain things to our children that we might even find difficult to understand ourselves. Children are naturally curious and like me, you might have had your kids ask questions about topics like food and energy becoming more expensive, the war in Ukraine or climate change. 

These things are all over the news at the moment, and as an adult and the mum of two young children, there‘s no avoiding it. In fact, the rising cost of living is probably already causing you anxiety. 

But children are exposed to this too, and even very young children will be hearing about these issues, and they could already be directly affecting their day-to-day lives. 

The impact of the rise in the cost of living will be different for every family, as will the changes to your budget you might need to make. And some children will find it harder than others – but all will be impacted. 

So how do we talk confidently to our children about this, and make it an informative conversation, but not a worrying one? How do we raise the issue of disparity, and how others might feel the impact differently than we do, so that our kids can be empathetic and thoughtful?

Cost of living and climate change have been an opportunity to talk more about day-to-day money management, and discuss things like the cost of energy and food and how and why prices change. My kids do really care about the environment, so I think this is a really good starting place for talking about money.

We’ve looked at a map of the world and talked about where different products come from, how some countries have oil and gas, and others have good weather for growing fruit and vegetables during our winter season. Once they understand this, you can explain why climate change and war can mean it’s more expensive to buy certain items. You can also talk about supply and demand, so when a lot of people want to buy something, if there isn’t much available, the price will go up.  

Living in a farming community as we do, we’ve taken it back to basics in terms of having conversations about e.g. what happens if it doesn’t rain, and the grass doesn’t grow, and the cows have less to eat… and related that back to the price of meat. They could an see the brown fields we had due to the droughts this summer with their own eyes, so this seems easy to understand. 

Here are my top three tips on how you can start conversations about money which you hopefully will find useful.

This summer on our holiday we discussed as a family how we were going to stay within budget and we asked the kids to choose how we would spend our budget for treats. We found that where we were staying certain things that would be a luxury at home were actually some of the cheapest things we could buy, so we ate more of the local produce. This was an opportunity to talk about the costs built into growing, packing and transporting produce around the world.

You don’t need to be on holiday to ask them to help you budget though. At the supermarket, consider giving them some money and ask them to budget for dinner or their school lunches for the week. Just getting them used to thinking about how much things cost and therefore how much you can buy is a great start.

We’ve started talking to the kids about the winter ahead, and what changes we will make to cope with higher energy costs, and what role the kids can have in helping to save energy, and we asked them for their ideas.

Giving them a role in this is so important – they really can have a tangible impact. We’ve talked about energy use of different things around the house, and about things like insulation (or lack of in our draughty old house), baths versus showers, how often we wash our clothes.

We’ve also talked a lot about how other families, who have less money might be coping with the price of everything going up so quickly. My kids have pen pals in Kenya, so we talked a lot about how climate change and rising costs might impact their friends there, as well as classmates at school.

We’ve started watching Newsround more regularly online too, and I’ve just subscribed to a free trial of the Week Junior to see if that will help bring some of these issues to life.

What I want other parents to take away from this blog, is that we have to talk about money with our kids. All of the stuff in our heads about money – whether it’s balking at supermarket prices, energy costs, or losing sleep about rent going up or the interest on your mortgage, we can talk about if we get the words right. And our kids will learn and grow and build important skills if we do this.