Emily brought this topic to the table recently and it’s been on my mind ever since. We have three kids ranging from tweens to teens, and the world they’re inheriting looks nothing like the one we came up in. This isn’t doom and gloom. It’s a heads up. Because if you can name the traps, you’ve got a shot at helping your kids avoid them. Here are the three biggest challenges our kids are going to have to overcome as they work toward financial stability and success:
Dopamine addition and the scroll that feeds it: We have a nickname for our phones in our house that I won’t repeat here, but it captures exactly what they do to you. You pick one up, get that first hit, and spend the next two hours going nowhere. The creativity drain is real. The motivation drain is real. And the part nobody talks about enough: boredom is actually productive. A bored kid figures something out, makes something, gets into something. A kid with a screen never has to be bored for five seconds.
Death of delayed gratification: When I was growing up and saw a really nice house, I assumed someone worked their whole life to earn it. That picture of work hard, build slowly, get there eventually made sense. The world our kids are scrolling through doesn’t tell that story anymore. They’re watching people their age appear to have everything, instantly, with no visible path of how they got there. It doesn’t just create unrealistic expectations. It slowly dissolves the belief that grinding toward something is even worth it. We see this play out in the workplace too. Young people entering the workforce are arriving with enormous pressure on them. Inflation is real, the cost of everything is real, and simultaneously there’s an expectation of advancement that hasn’t been earned yet. It’s not laziness. It’s the environment they’ve been raised in.
The illusion that money isn’t real: Contactless payments, one-click purchases, targeted ads engineered to wear you down until you buy. The whole system is designed to make spending feel frictionless and invisible. There’s no piggy bank. No counting out bills. No physical connection between earning money and spending it. And when money doesn’t feel real, saving it definitely doesn’t feel necessary.
The Action Steps
We can’t stop technology. If anything, it’s only going to intensify. But here’s what we’re focused on.
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