Sesame Street, purveyors of responsible lesson teaching and other helpful advice for kids, is teaming up with PNC Bank to teach kids basic financial lessons at an early age, so they can take those lessons into adulthood. Sesame Street plans to teach kids about saving, charitable contributions, and working to support one’s financial plans. PNC Bank will distribute materials at its branches for children to take home with them to reinforce the lessons.
Sesame Street for many years has taught children valuable lessons regarding other topics, such as literacy, nutrition, ethnic tolerance and other important things��math being among the most well-known��and such lessons have been shown to help children perform better in school, especially in categories such as math, reading, writing and science, which have been shown to be extremely important to overall academic performance.
Though aimed at children, financial lessons are the type that older viewers could perhaps learn as well. Sad as it might be, few parents understand the complicated world of finance, especially the difference between an IRA, a Roth IRA, futures, options, derivatives and other vocabulary terms that fly over the head of most average people. Few states require financial education as part of public school curriculum, which is unfortunate, due to the current economic realities of high unemployment, rising prices, increasingly complicated financial products and services, increasing costs of education and other important purchases. Parents with little or no education in the world of finance will have difficulty sharing those lessons with their children, and a plan to teach those lessons to the kids will go a long way in establishing the fundamentals.
Though neither Sesame Street nor PNC describe the lessons they will provide as complicated��rarely do they go beyond the basics of working, saving, spending wisely on necessities rather than pleasures, and forgoing one purchase for a more important one��such fundamental lessons are critical to building a solid practice of saving and spending responsibly. Kids can learn to save a few dollars for use on another purchase, can learn to save for the future, and can learn some self-control when handling money.
Studies have shown that even basic lessons can have a big impact on children’s ability to save and perform other tasks related to the lesson, and such simple strategies will be rather helpful for the children of depression-era America as they grow into adults and have to deal with what will likely be an economic climate less burgeoning with opportunity as those of past generations. Financial lessons couldn’t come at a better time.
This announcement, ironically, arrives around the same time as the Republican plan to cut NPR, PBS and other services which have been proven to help children perform better in school. Described as �frivolous� by some of the more prominent members of the party, such ironic proclamations show how little these individuals understand regarding the cause of financial problems they are claiming to solve, which, ironically, could potentially be a lesson Sesame Street could teach them. Perhaps they should sit down with their kids and learn a lesson or two from Elmo and company.