KIDS TODAY: WHAT IS CASH?

Ralph Pantozzi, a math teacher in Summit, N.J., said his school’s lemonade stand sometimes puzzles some of the third-graders who run it. It isn’t usually the math, or dealing with customers, that stumps them.

It’s the hard currency.

"We see them with their cash register and they’re picking up the money and I know they look at it sort of ‘what do I do with this?,’ " he said. "They’re really not used to it."

Teaching youngsters the value of dollars and cents is a task that has vexed parents for generations. Now parents face a new challenge: delivering the lesson in a world where children rarely encounter actual money.

Retailers notice bewilderment when young customers come into their stores armed with the paper money they have been given for holidays or a birthday. "Sometimes the kids that are given cash, even the idea that it’s not a gift card is completely foreign," said Gaetana Schueckler, who has owned The TreeHouse Toy Store in Buffalo, N.Y., since 1996.

For years, one of its top sellers was a toy cash register. The store doesn’t even carry them anymore, since "for kids, it’s not something they see," said Ms. Schueckler.

"She tucks that money away into her piggy bank and she has a disconnect in terms of how that money then turns into the purchasing of goods, because we then buy mostly everything online or via a credit card," said Ms. Noel, who lives in Los Angeles. "It’s more like a collectible item."

To read the complete article (subscription required), see:
The First Money Lesson to Teach Your Children: This Is What a Dollar Looks Like (https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-first-money-lesson-to-teach-your-children-this-is-what-a-dollar-looks-like-11549657256)

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