Lindsey Crossmier at Forbes Advisor reported that one in four kids has made an online purchase without a parent's approval, and parents are discovering charges averaging well over $300 after the fact. Only 19% of parents thought their kids were buying things on their own. The gap between those two numbers is the story.
My point to Forbes was that the purchase problem is a device problem. With kids able to buy on a phone or tablet in two taps, conversations about money and spending need to go hand in hand with kids getting access to devices. The moment a child gets a device that can reach a store, the family needs a rule about what can be bought, by whom, with whose money, and how it gets approved. Most families set up screen-time rules. Far fewer set up spending rules, and the app stores are designed to make the difference expensive.
The practical fixes in the piece are good ones: parent-managed checking accounts and debit cards with real-time notifications, so a child spends their own money and the parent sees every transaction; purchase approvals turned on for every app store and console; and no saved parent credit card on any shared device.
The bigger opportunity is that a $9.99 surprise charge is the cheapest financial lesson a kid will ever get. Use it. A child who learns at nine that money leaves an account when they tap is a 25-year-old who reads the fine print.
Read the full article at Forbes →
