Talk about money, then let them decide: what goes with stronger money skills

Most families already talk

The 2022 PISA assessment asked 15-year-olds in 20 countries and economies how often they discuss seven money topics with their parents. The answers put paid to the idea that money is a taboo at home. On average across OECD countries, 83% talk at least monthly about money for things they want to buy, 77% about shopping online, 76% about their own spending decisions and 76% about their own saving decisions. Fewer discuss the family budget (56%) or economic news (58%), and fewer than 15% discuss any topic almost daily. Even in Peru, the lowest-scoring system on this item, three-quarters of students talk at least monthly about money for things they want to buy. OECD, PISA 2022 Volume IV, chapter 4

The topics vary by family circumstance. Better-off students discuss six of the seven topics more often than disadvantaged students, with the biggest gap for economic news; disadvantaged students are the ones who discuss the family budget more. OECD The United States did not take part in 2022, but its 2018 PISA results showed the same shape: frequent discussion of spending decisions went with scores 16 points higher, and frequent discussion of economic news with scores 18 points lower, after adjustment. NCES, 2023 A company survey from 2020 adds the parents' side: 41% of US parents of 8–14-year-olds reported some reluctance to discuss money with their children, and 22% did so at least weekly. T. Rowe Price, 2020

What goes with a higher score

The OECD then compared students' financial-literacy scores with what their families do, after accounting for gender, socio-economic status and immigrant background. Three results stand out. Students who discuss their own spending decisions with parents weekly or monthly score 12 points higher than those who never do. Students who agree they can decide independently what to spend their money on, which is 83% of them, score about 30 points higher than those who do not. And students who discuss the family budget weekly or monthly score 13 points lower than those who never do. For scale, one PISA proficiency level is about 75 points. OECD

The frequency finding is easy to misread. For every topic, students who talk about it almost daily score lower than those who talk about it weekly or monthly. The OECD's own reading is not that talking harms children but that the arrow may run the other way: families under money pressure discuss the budget more, and teenagers who struggle with money may ask for advice more often. It also notes that the survey "could not ascertain the quality of conversations". Canadian data show the same shape before adjustment, with weekly talkers scoring 12 to 29 points below monthly talkers depending on the topic, and composite measures of "parental involvement" show no statistically significant link in Italy or Peru once other factors are included. OECD Canada, CMEC Italy, INVALSI Peru, Bazán-Ramírez and colleagues Our reading is that the kind of conversation matters more than the count, but the data cannot show which kinds help.

Autonomy shows the larger association in the OECD data, and the Czech national analysis finds the same: students who can decide their own spending score 43 points higher after adjusting for family wealth and gender, while those who must ask permission before any spending score 44 points lower. Czech Ministry of Education, 2025 Autonomy is also the variable most tangled up with affluence and maturity, so the honest statement is that giving children control over some money is strongly associated with knowing how to handle it, not that it causes it.

Three ingredients at home

The UK's Money and Pensions Service asks a related question of 7–17-year-olds and their parents: do children get a meaningful financial education, at school or at home? At home, the definition has three parts: the child receives regular money (pocket money, an allowance or earnings), the parents set rules about money, and the child makes some spending decisions. In 2022, 71% of children said they received regular money, 35% of parents said they set rules about money, and 91% of children said they made some spending decisions. Only 24% had all three. Adding useful money lessons at school, 47% of children met the overall definition, a figure essentially unchanged since 2019. MaPS, 2022 survey

Children who met that definition looked different on the five outcomes compared here. They were more likely to feel confident managing their money (49% against 31%), to save at least once a month (52% against 33%, among children who receive money), to save some money every time they got any (21% against 14%), and to think it important to learn to manage money (87% against 79%). These are comparisons between groups at one point in time, not the result of an experiment. MaPS

An earlier analysis of the same survey series ranked the home factors by the strength of their link with children's money behaviour: the child being responsible for some financial decisions and the child receiving regular money came out strongest, discussing money with others somewhat weaker, and parents setting rules weakest of the four. Clarke & Ghezelayagh, 2018 The first two steps mirror the PISA picture: responsibility first, conversation second.

Parents are not short of goodwill. In the UK survey, 56% of parents felt confident talking to their child about money and 88% of children said they would go to their parents for money advice. Where families differ is in practice rather than belief: parents in lower-income households are somewhat less likely to have frequent money conversations with their children, and in interviews many say they avoid the subject to shield children from worry, but the same share of parents in low- and high-income homes, 13%, say they simply do not know how to talk to their child about money. MaPS Anders, Jerrim & Macmillan MaPS, 2025

What lasts into adulthood

Does any of this persist? The best evidence comes from asking adults what their parents did. In a Dutch household survey run from 2000 to 2012, 1,298 household heads recalled how their parents had handled money with them as children. Those who recalled any parental teaching about saving were 16 percentage points more likely to be savers as adults. The strategies were not equal. Advice on its own, and freedom to spend one's own money on its own, each went with a 14–15 point higher probability of saving. Pocket money on its own, or pocket money with freedom to spend it but no advice, showed no reliable link. The combination of advice, pocket money and the freedom to spend it went with a 25 point higher probability, the largest of all. Bucciol & Veronesi, 2014

A smaller study in Bangkok found the same pattern for financial literacy itself: adults whose parents taught them to budget and encouraged them to save as teenagers scored higher, with part of the link running through numeracy, while simply having had a bank account before 18 showed no link. Grohmann, Kouwenberg & Menkhoff, 2015 These studies rely on memory and cannot rule out that the kind of parent who teaches saving differs in other ways; their authors say so. The pattern they share with the teenage data is nonetheless hard to miss: money a child controls, plus an adult who talks it through, went with better outcomes than money or talk alone.

The "age seven" line

One line appears in many parenting articles on this subject: that children's money habits are set by age seven. It is attributed to a 2013 University of Cambridge report for the UK's Money Advice Service. The report exists, and it is worth reading, but it does not say that. It is a review of research on how young children develop self-regulation, and its claim is that "by the age of seven years, several basic concepts relating broadly to later 'finance' behaviours will typically have developed": counting, understanding that money is exchanged for goods, understanding change. Nothing in it shows that habits are fixed at seven or cannot be changed afterwards. Whitebread & Bingham, 2013 The accurate version is less dramatic and more encouraging: the building blocks are usually in place by seven, which makes the primary-school years a good time to start handing over small amounts of real money, and nothing is lost if you start later.

Türkiye: a gap worth naming

There is no Turkish survey of how often parents talk to their children about money, and Türkiye has not taken part in the PISA financial-literacy assessment or the OECD's 2023 adult survey. The one figure that exists is from a bank-commissioned financial-literacy index in 2017: 23% of respondents with children said they gave them no financial education at home on saving or spending. TEB–Boğaziçi index, via FODER Turkish readers should treat the findings above as hypotheses about their own families rather than facts about Turkish ones.