MSI Press Blog

Recently released: Audiobook edition of  Clean Your Plate! by Liz Bayaradelle. Book description Parents mean well, we really do. We want our kids to get good grades, stop hitting their siblings, and, yes, clean their plate at dinnertime. It shouldn't be that hard, right? Wrong. Sometimes these harmless sounding statements don't work. Even worse, they often backfire to cause unexpected and unwelcome side effects for us and for our kids. (Just like your prescription for headache medicine may accidentally cause vomiting or make you spontaneously sprout a leathery tail.) This book takes 13 of the most common parent-isms and walks you through the ways they can go wrong, why they could negatively impact your kids, and what you should say instead. Includes parental greatest hits - Do You Need Any Money? - Get Straight A's - Don't Be a Quitter - Don't Talk Back (to Your Elders) - Waste Not, Want Not - Be Nice to Your Friends - Give Your Aunt a Hug - Win Your Game Today - F...

  / Excerpt from  Clean Your Plate!  (Bayardelle)  -   Chapter 1 Do You Need Any Money?  (continued from November 22, 2024) The Need for Need  We’ve discussed the “supply” end of your kid’s finances, but the “demand” side should also get a little bit of attention. The point of having a financial system is to teach your kids how to manage their money as an adult, but they don’t have those pesky expenses we have as adults. We grown-up folk go to work every day because without our salary we can’t afford things like food or rent. This is a pretty significant motivator. Unfortunately, there’s no driving force quite so urgent in your child’s financial ecosystem. No matter what chores they do (or don’t do), you’re going to pay for their food, housing, school, and other necessary expenses, so why bother taking the garbage out?  This is when the art of creating valid needs comes in. You never want to deprive your child of the necessities, b...

  / Excerpt from  Clean Your Plate!  (Bayardelle)  -   Chapter 1 Do You Need Any Money?  (continued from May 22, 2024) So, How Do Kids Get Money?  So, now that we can all agree kids need some kind of financial experience, the questions become how do we give them money, how much should they get, and what (if any) rules should be attached to the way they spend it? We’ll go over each of these questions in the upcoming sections, but before we go any further, I want to make one thing very clear: not all household chores should be paid.  The Case for Unpaid Chores   There is a wealth of psychological research that demonstrates the long-term benefits of having kids do chores. Kids who were given chores at home have been shown to have better social relationships and higher grades, get better early-career jobs, and manifest a higher degree of self-sufficiency (M. Rossman, 2002, cited in Wallace, 2015).  These findings were strongest ...

Excerpt from  Clean Your Plate!  (Bayardelle)  -   Chapter 1 Do You Need Any Money?   The trope of Mom or Dad being a child’s ATM has gotten so common it’s not even a funny Internet meme anymore. (And if you’re at all familiar with the Internet, that’s really saying something.) Every parent knows that it’s probably bad just to hand their kid money whenever they want something, but that doesn’t mean we’re actually good at resisting the urge to do just that when the situation arises.  Why We Say It  If it helps assuage your parental guilt at all, this isn’t a bad impulse to have. You’ve spent the entirety of your child’s life trying to provide for all their needs, even trying to anticipate your child’s needs before they even occur so your little kidlet doesn’t have to want for anything. Do any of you moms out there have a purse whose sheer heft equals your body weight due to the abundance of granola bars, spare socks, and just in case t...