In my last post, I wrote about a question my 8-year-old, Sam, asked me one morning at the breakfast table. Today, I want to look in the other direction, to my own childhood, and what that has to do with the financial realities today.
We were two children, one employed adult, and Christmas was coming. My parents were managing, but only just, and they had gradually begun to lower expectations, perhaps their own as well.
So they told their 5-year-old daughter, well in advance, that Santa Claus had received so many letters that winter that he had run out of presents. Santa is generous, they explained, but Santa is not bottomless. Everybody knew, of course, that Santa did not actually manufacture the gifts. He bought them, like anyone else.
For a 5-year-old, this was a disaster.
But children often have an unnerving ability to solve problems before the adults around them notice. I went to my room, found old toys, and wrapped them carefully. One for my mother, one for my father, one for each of my grandparents, and some for myself and my brother. By the morning, I had become, in my own mind, the hero of Christmas. There would be presents under the tree. There would be the best part of Christmas, the opening. I had solved the first money problem of my life and brought joy to my family.
This is my first memory of money.
The ending was happier than I expected. Santa, it turned out, had found gifts for the young family after all. The old toys were quietly returned to my bedroom, and the matter was never mentioned again.
And yet, that Christmas has stayed with me my whole life. It is a memory about adapting to something a child has a hard time understanding. It is also a memory about something common, the kind of relative scarcity and insecurity that exists in many families, unremarkable incidents that carry the weight of heavy emotions.
The Story I Did Not Know I Had
That memory, and the dozens that followed, quietly built a way of thinking I never noticed I had. I came to believe that whether we had plenty of money or just about enough, we would manage, and our problems would be temporary. I also came to believe that the lack of money should be discussed as little as possible, because it was an exceptional and slightly shameful situation that should not happen to a normal middle-income family.
For years, this unconscious way of thinking influenced countless decisions and choices. I sat in the bank applying for a mortgage. I bought a trendy financial guide. I spent money I didn’t have. I left my finances in someone else’s hands. All of this, my own story about money, had started very early, long before I had the words for it.
What Behavioral Science Says About Early Money Learning
Behavioral scientists Sue Bingham and David Whitebread of the University of Cambridge reviewed the evidence on how children develop a relationship with money. Their 2013 report for the United Kingdom’s Money Advice Service concluded that the cognitive and metacognitive foundations of later financial behavior, things like self-control, working memory, and the ability to apply rules of money management, are typically in place by around age 7 (Whitebread and Bingham, 2013). By the time formal financial education begins in school, much of the underlying architecture is already there.
Financial psychologists have given these patterns a name. Brad and Ted Klontz, drawing on two decades of clinical work and testing the framework empirically in a sample of 422 adults, describe them as money scripts, which are simply unconscious beliefs about money, usually formed in childhood, driving adult financial behavior (Klontz, Britt, Mentzer, and Klontz, 2011). Klontz hypothesizes that these scripts often pass down through families, like recipes nobody wrote out. They feel like common sense, not like beliefs. And they steer some of our most consequential adult choices: whether we open the bill or let it sit on the counter, whether we celebrate a raise or feel quietly guilty about it, whether we tell our partner about a purchase or smuggle it home in an old cloth bag.
What predicts a child carrying harmful scripts into adulthood is not, as one might expect, the family’s debt or income. In a study of 173 college students, parents’ own struggles with debt did not significantly predict their children’s debt levels, but having parents who avoided talking about finances did predict problematic credit-card use as young adults (Norvilitis and MacLean, 2010). The silence matters more than we think.
An Inheritance, Not a Destiny
This is not a counsel of despair. We might say that the childhood money story is more of an inheritance than destiny, and the first step in rewriting the story is recognizing that we have one. After all, we all do.
So here is the question I would like to leave with you, the same one I had to sit with myself:
What is your first memory of money?
Sit with whatever comes up. Notice whether the memory is about lack or about plenty, about silence or about openness, about shame or about pride. Notice the small details, what you were wearing, who was in the room, what was said, and what was not said. That memory may still be active, helping to mould your financial life today. The good news is that once you begin to recognise the memorable moment, you can begin to choose what to do with it.
Adapted from Money Values: How to Be Financially Mindful (Prometheus, 2026).
