Building Investment Gurus of Tomorrow

“The children of today will make the India of tomorrow. The way we bring them up will determine the future of the country.” – Jawaharlal Nehru

A new age problem

Modern parents face a unique challenge that previous generations never had to. Our children nowadays are smart with gadgets but at the same time are increasingly addicted to online content. This challenge is manifested among families across countries and social classes and is steadily progressing towards becoming an actual problem.

Instead of letting your young genius stare at a screen that doesn’t teach them anything, why not let them learn a life skill that can make them financially independent at the right age? Help them start investing money online. Sounds intimidating? Doing so will probably have more benefits than you think. Here’s why.

Benefits of having your children start investing

• It will be their first step to understanding and taking responsibility for personal finance – in other words it will increase their financial literacy and abilities. They will learn taxes, investing and banking at an early age, something that will probably not happen in schools or coaching classes.

• It will immensely increase their abilities in mathematics as well as create in them a knack for finance, tech and current affairs. In a larger context, they will also understand how big businesses, the overall economy, the media as well as crowd mindset work. Therefore, even if you fear that too much focus on investing will affect their studies, active investing will only positively boost their career prospects in the long run and open up high-paying careers in finance, mathematics and statistics for them. In fact, investing will teach them how to extract required knowledge from a plethora of information from various sources and how to use them practically. 
• Making them invest will also inculcate important values and character in children – it will make the kids smart, stoic, responsible, curious and value knowledge and learning.
• Usually parents give pocket money to their children who spend it on consumption – this habit makes children become not only financially but also mentally dependent on their parents for every small spending. Teaching them how to invest and then giving them both authority and responsibility over the fund will surely give them a sense of independence and self-sufficiency. Who knows, they might end up funding their own secondary or higher education.

Addressing some concerns 

Of course, giving your child a phone itself feels uneasy, let alone a large sum of money to be invested in an ecosystem of risk. You must be afraid that they will lose money. However, at some point of time, they should learn this skill anyway – so the earlier they learn it, the better. For now, give your children less money and more knowledge. Teach them not only the technical skills but also the mindset i.e. not giving in to short-term panic and making logical and possibly data-driven decisions. Help your children conduct the transactions related to banks and taxes in the initial stages, until they learn to do it themselves.

As parents you might also fear that your children may get so invested in the act of investing that they become too money-minded and introverted. They may refuse to go outside the house and lack social skills. In that case, you need to keep things simple and easy and let them enjoy a social life. Most importantly, you can show them how to use the money they earned for good things such as charity.

The way forward

So let us take a step in the direction of making our children responsible and aware citizens with a more secure financial future. Open a demat account for your child’s investments in a matter of minutes today!