They Are Learning It By Watching

Nobody sits a child down and teaches them about money. That is not how any of it is transmitted.

What actually happens is that a child spends eighteen years in a house, and picks up an atmosphere, and the atmosphere teaches them everything. Whether money is a safe subject or a dangerous one. Whether it makes the adults go quiet. What happens to a room when a particular envelope arrives. Whether it is possible to ask what something cost.

None of that is taught deliberately and all of it is learned completely.

And you know this, because you can identify, right now, exactly what you learned in your own childhood house, and you almost certainly did not choose to learn any of it either.

What gets shown to the next lot

There is a line in Psalm 78 that is about handing something on, and the verb it uses is worth noticing.

We will not hide them from their children, shewing to the generation to come the praises of the LORD, and his strength, and his wonderful works that he hath done. (Psalm 78:4, King James Version)

Shewing. Showing.

Not explaining, and not teaching in the classroom sense. Showing, which is what actually happens in a household, and which is what is happening in yours whether you have decided anything about it or not, and the Holy Spirit has always worked that way with generations.

And notice the first half: we will not hide them from their children. The psalm is written by people whose history contained a great deal that was hard, and the decision is not to hide the record from the next generation.

Psalm 78:4 puts showing rather than instructing at the center of what passes between generations, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that both a challenge and a relief for a parent who has been trying to teach something they cannot articulate.

You are showing them something already, and it has never once been transmitted by explanation. Psalm 78:4 uses shewing rather than teaching for what passes between generations, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that plain to a parent who has not yet decided what is being handed on.

Not hiding and not burdening

Now, the two ditches, because everybody who tries this falls into one of them.

The first is hiding. Keeping every hard fact away from children so that they grow up in a house where money is never mentioned, and where they learn, very precisely, that this is a subject adults cannot handle. That is what a silence teaches. It does not teach nothing.

The second is burdening. Telling children the true state of things in a way that hands them a weight they cannot do anything with. A nine year old who knows the household is short cannot fix it and will lie awake about it, and that is not honesty, it is offloading.

Between those is the thing this article is actually about, which is a calm sentence.

Not a full disclosure and not a silence. One ordinary, honest, unfrightened sentence, said in front of them, in a normal voice, and Psalm 78:4 shows a generation being shown rather than either shielded or loaded, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can hold the middle for somebody who has only ever seen the ditches.

You are able to be honest without handing them a weight, and the two have never once been the same thing. The written word says we will not hide them from their children, in a psalm that also does not deliver the burden to them, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a parent out of both ditches.

What a calm sentence sounds like

Let me be concrete, because calm is a vague instruction.

It sounds like: we are not doing that this month, and that is fine. It sounds like: that is more than we spend on those. It sounds like: I do not know yet, I will work it out.

What makes those work is not the content. It is the tone, and specifically the absence of two things: no apology, and no anxiety. Not defensive, not sighing, not a lesson attached.

Because what your child is calibrating is not the amount. It is whether this is a subject that can be discussed without the temperature changing. A child who hears no in an ordinary voice learns that limits exist and are survivable. A child who hears no with tension attached learns that money is where the fear in this house is kept.

Psalm 78:4 has a generation being shown things plainly and without concealment, and the Holy Spirit is the one who steadies a voice in an ordinary moment in a kitchen.

You are teaching a temperature rather than a fact, and the amount has never once been the part they are learning. Psalm 78:4 has one generation showing the next plainly rather than anxiously, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in the tone of an ordinary sentence.