As parents, we teach our kids about things we feel competent in. That's why so many parents don't teach their kids about money.
Interpretation
Parents often share knowledge in areas where they feel confident, leading to gaps in essential life skills like financial education.
In this quote, Dave Ramsey highlights the tendency of parents to impart knowledge in subjects where they feel knowledgeable. This can create a significant omission in vital areas such as financial literacy, as many parents may not be well-versed in money management, thus missing the opportunity to teach their children important life skills.
In practice
In a parent-teacher meeting, a discussion on the importance of teaching kids about finances can include this quote.
Debt is so ingrained into our culture that most Americans can't even envision a car without a payment ... a house without a mortgage ... a student without a loan ... and credit without a card. We've been sold debt with such repetition and with such fervor that most folks can't conceive of what it would be like to have NO payments.
The thing I have discovered about working with personal finance is that the good news is that it is not rocket science. Personal finance is about 80 percent behavior. It is only about 20 percent head knowledge.
Debt collectors like to play on your emotions because they think you'll give in and do something you can't really afford to do. Most of them don't care about you or your situation as long as they get some money.
Hitting bottom and hitting it hard was the worst thing that ever happened to me and the best thing that ever happened to me.
Your priorities, passions, goals, and fears are shown clearly in the flow of your money.
You have to teach children about money intentionally - create teachable moments.
There are two ways of dealing with nonsense in this world. One way is to put nonsense in the right place; as when people put nonsense into nursery rhymes. The other is to put nonsense in the wrong place; as when they put it into educational addresses, psychological criticisms, and complaints against nursery rhymes or other normal amusements of mankind.
From kindergarten to college, certain teachers engaged my curiosity and motivated me to learn. While I was not the best student, their efforts left a lasting impact.
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
Consequently the student who is devoid of talent will derive no more profit from this work than barren soil from a treatise on agriculture.
The key to the trap is, of course, education. The feminine mystique has made higher education for women seem suspect, unnecessary and even dangerous. But I think that education, and only education, has saved, and can continue to save, American women from the greater dangers of the feminine mystique.
Never make fun of someone who speaks broken English. It means they know another language.
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