Poetry Friday: Talking to Kids about Money

Money is in the air. Not the physical stuff, but the concept.

While statistics are notoriously easy to manipulate, grouping U.S. Society into two wealth brackets -- 1% vs. 99% -- has caught hold of our collective imaginations. (Here's an interesting article on the topic, from 2007.)

This chart is from The World's Best Ever. Full disclosure, this is not an unbiased source.

How do we talk to children about the Occupy Wall Street protests, and why people are so upset? Kids realize -- of course -- that society feels unstable to many people right now. My 11-year-old was listening to NPR with me in the car, and began asking questions about the collapse of the housing markets.

I like using poetry as a jumping off point for these types of discussions. Sharing a poem, talking about what it might mean and exploring a child's reaction, provides a shoreline -- a safe place to begin when we're about to navigate a choppy conversation together.

This week, I've been reading Gary Soto's A Fire in My Hands. The poem "How Things Work" is simple enough that even young children  could begin thinking about the interplay between money and society.

Soto opens the poem with a note, "Our young daughter was always asking impossibly difficult questions. Where do the stars come from? Why is the world round? How come we sleep at night? I could answer some of the questions, and other I couldn't -- like the questions about the economy of our nation."

How Things Work
by Gary Soto

Today it’s going to cost us twenty dollars

To live. Five for a softball. Four for a book,

A handful of ones for coffee and two sweet rolls,

Bus fare, rosin for your mother’s violin.

We’re completing our task. The tip I left

For the waitress filters down

Like rain, wetting the new roots of a child

Perhaps, a belligerent cat that won’t let go

Of a balled sock until there’s chicken to eat.

As far as I can tell, daughter, it works like this:

You buy bread from a grocery, a bag of apples

From a fruit stand, and what coins

Are passed on helps others buy pencils, glue,

Tickets to a movie in which laughter

Is thrown into their faces. 

Read the rest at the Poetry Foundation.

Like a poem, the economy is an elusive thing. There are many ways of looking at how capitalism affects the way we interact with others. Similar to reading a poem, the point is not necessarily finding a "right" answer. It is to begin the practice of looking.

Today's Poetry Friday host is Laura Salas at her new blog, Writing the World for Kids.