Talk Money Week at the kitchen table: five conversations, one per night
My son has been asking to get a puppy, so I did some research and we found a breed that we thought would fit our lifestyle. Out of curiosity, I asked him how much he though it would cost to by. He said “£400”. The actual cost was £2000. “Oh” was all he could respond with.
I did not correct the answer. That turned out to be the most useful thing I did all week, and it is the whole method behind what follows.
Talk Money Week starts on Monday. Most of what is published for it is written for adults, employers and schools, and very little of it is written for a family with a nine-year-old and a dishwasher to empty. So this is the family version: five conversations, one per night, over food, none of them longer than the meal.
What Talk Money Week is, and why the kitchen table
Talk Money Week is run by the Money and Pensions Service, the government-backed body for financial guidance in the UK, and in 2026 it runs from Monday 2 to Friday 6 November. The idea is simple: people who talk about money tend to handle it better than people who do not, so one week a year is set aside to make the conversation normal.
The reason to run it at home rather than leave it to the schools programme is in the Money and Pensions Service’s own numbers. Their survey of children and young people uses a composite definition of “meaningful financial education” that combines two things: useful financial education the child remembers from school, and, at home, receiving regular money under rules with real responsibility for their own spending decisions. In 2022, 47% of children and young people met that definition - that’s fewer than half!
Look at the home half of that definition again: Regular money; Rules; Responsibility for spending decisions. None of that is a lesson. It is a kitchen table with a child at it who has some money of their own and is allowed to decide what happens to it. That is the part of the definition a parent controls entirely, and it is the part this week is for.
Why a conversation, and not a lesson?
The instinct, once you decide money matters, is to explain it. Budgeting, saving, what a pound is worth. That instinct is aimed at the wrong lever.
Research carried out at the University of Cambridge for the Money Advice Service found that teaching young children explicit financial knowledge is unlikely, on its own, to change their behaviour. The same report found that the foundations later money behaviour rests on, such as self-control and being able to apply a rule, are largely in place by around age seven. That is not the same as saying habits are fixed by seven, and it is regularly misread that way. Older children clearly go on learning. The useful finding is the first one: an explanation does not move behaviour. A decision does.
There is a timing problem as well, and it is worth being precise about whose problem it is. Financial education has been part of the secondary curriculum in England since 2014, through citizenship and maths, but it is not currently required at primary level. That changes with the revised national curriculum, which brings financial literacy into primary teaching from September 2028. A child who is nine today will be eleven by then. This is not a failing of schools or teachers. It is a timetable, and the gap it leaves is sitting at your kitchen table right now.
The same survey found that a third of children recalled learning about money at school and finding it useful, that 24 per cent had received financial education at home, and that only 10 per cent had both. The school number is not a provision figure, and it should not be read as one: it measures whether a child remembers the lesson and found it useful, which is a higher bar than whether the lesson was taught. But the home number is the one a parent can do something about on a Tuesday, and it is lower.
So a conversation is not a lesson in a smaller box. The difference is who is doing the talking. In a lesson the parent explains and the child waits for it to end. In the five below, the parent asks one question and then does the hardest thing in parenting, which is nothing.
Why five short ones, and not one big one?
Every parent has attempted the sit-down. I swear that their face goes a particular way. Something is delivered, nothing is retained, and everyone agrees not to do it again.
Five questions over five nights works for the opposite reason. Each one is small enough that the child does not brace for it. It is asked over food, when everyone is already sitting down and nobody can leave without it being noticed. And because there is only one question, there is nowhere for it to become a speech.
Three rules that hold for all five:
You ask. They answer. You do not correct. The point is to find out what your child actually thinks money is, and you will not find out if the first wrong answer gets fixed. Write it down afterwards if you like. Ask the same question in six months.
The parent goes first on the awkward ones. Two of the five ask the child to admit something. A child will not go first on that. You will have to.
Real numbers. “A few pounds” teaches nothing. £4.20 teaches something, and it is funnier.
The Kitchen Table Kit: five nights
Monday: “What do you think this cost?”
Point at the meal. Not the ingredients in the abstract, the actual plates in front of you. Ask for a number.
What it is for. For most children, money arrives as a transfer and leaves as a tap. Cash fell from 51 per cent of UK payments in 2013 to 8 per cent in 2025, and a child who has grown up watching a card touch a reader has had far fewer chances to see a price attached to a physical thing. Their guess will be wrong. The size of the gap is the finding, not the mistake.
What to listen for. Whether they anchor to anything at all. “About a hundred pounds” is a different answer from “about the same as a pizza”. The second child has a reference point and is reasoning from it, even if the reasoning is off. The first is guessing a number that sounds like money.
What not to do. Do not tell them the real figure as a correction. Tell them as information, once, and move on. The gap closes on its own over the next few weeks, because they will start noticing prices they never looked at before, and that is the whole job done.
Tuesday: “Where does the money in this house come from?”
Not “how much”. Where from. What the adults in the house actually do for the hours that turn into the money.
What it is for. A surprising number of children, asked this, will say “the bank” or “the card” and mean it. The link between hours worked and money in the account is invisible unless somebody points at it, and nobody points at it because it feels like a strange thing to bring up with a ten-year-old. It is not strange. It is the first half of the only money lesson that matters, which is that money is stored effort.
What to listen for. Whether they connect the two at all. A child who says “you go to work and they pay you” has the shape of it. A child who says “the bank” has not been shown the shape yet and this is the night to start.
What not to do. You do not have to say the salary. You can say “roughly forty hours a week” and “roughly what a big food shop costs, per day” and let them do arithmetic if they want to. The point is the connection, not the figure.
Wednesday: “If you earned ten pounds this week, what would you do with it?”
Earned, not given. The word matters.
What it is for. This is the night the child does the deciding, and it is the one most families skip because it feels like nothing is being taught. Something is. In a study of children introduced to an uninteresting task, giving them real control over the decision produced more engagement and better feeling towards the task, while rewards on their own made no measurable difference either way. The money is not the active ingredient. The decision is. A ten-pound plan, made out loud, is practice for a ten-thousand-pound one.
What to listen for. Whether they have a plan or a purchase. “A game” is a purchase. “Save half for the thing, spend the rest” is a plan. Both are fine on Wednesday. What you are listening for is whether the idea of splitting money into more than one job has occurred to them yet, because if it has not, the next few weeks of real pocket money are where it will.
What not to do. Do not improve the plan. “You could save all of it” is a lecture wearing a question’s clothes.
Thursday: “What is something you bought that you wish you hadn’t?”
You go first. This is not optional.
When I had this conversation, I said that I regretted buying a camper van. I had idyllic visions of travelling round the country every weekend, getting away from my office desk, and being at one with nature. It didn’t kind of pan out like that. We’re lucky if we go away a couple of weekends a year! I told him how many tens of thousands it cost, and that it took me about 12 months to slip back into old habits and now I only use it to drive to Tesco and back. My son said something sweet “At least we got to go on some adventures”. How sweet.
What it is for. Regret is the only money feeling that reliably changes the next decision, and it is the one parents most often try to spare their children. Do not. A regretted £4 purchase at nine is the cheapest tuition available, and the lesson only arrives if somebody says the regret out loud instead of hiding it under the bed with the thing.
What to listen for. Whether they can name the trade-off. “I wish I hadn’t bought it” is a start. “I wish I hadn’t bought it because I could have had the other thing” is the lesson in full. If they get to the second sentence unprompted, you can stop for the night. That is what opportunity cost sounds like from a child, and nobody has ever learned it from the phrase.
What not to do. No “I told you so”, however quietly, and especially not with a look. The look is the reason children stop telling you things.
Friday: “What would you do if you wanted something that cost more than you had?”
The last one, and the one the whole week has been building to.
What it is for. There are only four answers to this question. Wait. Earn. Ask. Borrow. A child who has spent the week thinking about where money comes from and what it costs to get it wrong will usually reach for the first two. What you are checking is whether the fourth one is in their vocabulary yet, and if it is, whether it arrived looking free.
It usually does. A 2026 study of young adults in New Zealand found that four in ten did not think of “buy now, pay later” as a form of debt at all, and that the ones who did not were the heavier users and the more likely to borrow elsewhere to keep up. That is a different country and an older age group, and it is one study, so it should not be stretched further than it goes. What it does show is what borrowing looks like when it arrives before anyone has said the word out loud: not a decision, just a button.
What to listen for. Whether “borrow” comes up, and how. “Borrow it off you and pay you back from pocket money” is a child who understands that borrowed money is still owed. “Just get it on the phone” is a child who has seen the button and not the bill.
What not to do. Do not ban borrowing as a word. It is a real option and they will meet it. Ask what paying it back would look like and let them do the maths. A child who works out on Friday night that borrowing £20 means four weeks of no pocket money has learned more about credit than most people learn before they use it.
The five, in order
- Monday: What do you think this cost?
- Tuesday: Where does the money in this house come from?
- Wednesday: If you earned ten pounds this week, what would you do with it?
- Thursday: What is something you bought that you wish you hadn’t? (You go first.)
- Friday: What would you do if you wanted something that cost more than you had?
Five minutes each. No slides. You are allowed to write the answers down.
The part that is not a tip
Money reaches most children as an abstraction. It appears as a number on a screen, it leaves as a tap, and nothing about that process teaches them what it is. The first time it becomes concrete for a lot of people is the first time they borrow it, at eighteen or nineteen, with a credit limit and no practice.
A child who has spent two years making small decisions about money they earned is not more virtuous at eighteen. They are more practised. That is the entire difference, and it is not a small one.
The five questions above do not require Talk Money Week. They do not require an app, a chart or a plan. They require a parent willing to ask a question and hear an answer they do not like without fixing it, five nights running. Then, in six months, asking again.
When should a child first hear the word “debt” from a parent, rather than from whoever is lending it?
After Friday
Ask one of the five once a month. Not the same one. The Wednesday question is the one to come back to most, because the answer changes as the money becomes real, and watching that answer change is the closest thing there is to watching judgement form.
I’ve been thinking about this problem long enough that I built something around it. Morechard is a family finance app built to give a child real money to make real decisions with, so the Wednesday question stops being hypothetical. The five conversations work without it.
References
Money and Pensions Service. Talk Money Week 2026, 2 to 6 November. maps.org.uk/en/our-work/talk-money-week. (TMW-2026)
Money and Pensions Service (2023). UK Children and Young People’s Financial Wellbeing Survey: Financial Foundations (2022 fieldwork). 47 per cent met the composite ‘meaningful financial education’ measure. (MAPS-MEANINGFUL)
Money and Pensions Service (2023). Same survey. A third recalled useful financial education at school; 24 per cent at home; 10 per cent both. (MAPS-RECALL-THIRD)
Whitebread, D. and Bingham, S. (2013). Habit Formation and Learning in Young Children. University of Cambridge for the Money Advice Service. (AGE7-FOUNDATIONS)
House of Lords Library. Financial education in schools. Statutory in secondary since September 2014; not statutory in primary. (EDU-STATUS-NOW)
Department for Education (2025-11-04). New curriculum to give young people the skills for life and work. First teaching September 2028. (CFE-2028)
UK Finance. UK Payment Markets 2026 (and prior editions). Cash 51 per cent of payments in 2013, 8 per cent in 2025. (CASH-DECLINE)
Joussemet, M., Koestner, R., Lekes, N. and Houlfort, N. (2004). Introducing Uninteresting Tasks to Children. Journal of Personality 72(1), 139-166. (AUTONOMY-INTERNALISATION)
Gilbert, A., Wang, Q., Kapitan, S. and Scott, A. (2026-09-15). ‘Buy now, pay later’ doesn’t feel like debt. The Conversation. New Zealand young adults; single study. (BNPL-YA-MISPERCEPTION)