Name: How Online Currency Is Changing the Way Kids Spend Money
Uploaded: 2023-11-15T19:55:00Z
Duration: 10 min 15 s

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From Youtube and video games to advertisements on social media, kids are seeing content about money – whether they know it or not. So how is this influencing their decisions about money? And how can we best prepare them for financial success in adulthood? In the first episode of Your Money Briefing’s four-part series, we look into how a new generation of kids are learning about money. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images

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How Online Currency Is Changing the Way Kids Spend Money

Ariana: Welcome to a special edition of "Your Money Briefing" for Wednesday, November 15th. I'm Ariana Aspuru for "The Wall Street Journal." Nowadays, kids have access to a world of information, tools, and markets that weren't there before. And that's leading to a ton of new questions about how they're forming their financial habits. Over the course of four weeks in November and December, "Your Money Briefing" will be looking into what's influencing kids' ideas about money, some innovative ways they're making money now, and what they should know about how to take care of it. Today, we're talking about how kids learn about money now and what that means for their financial decision-making in the future. To learn about how kids deal with money, we've gotta start with how they learn about money. Margaret Echelbarger has been thinking about money for most of her life.

Margaret: In fourth or fifth grade, I think, I dressed up as a money bag for Halloween. So I've come full circle.

Ariana: Now, as a grownup, she's an assistant professor of marketing at Stony Brook University. She also has a background in behavioral science. And she researches how kids understand economic concepts and act as consumers.

Margaret: Kids have a keen sense of how the world works before they're able to necessarily articulate in their words how the world works. And so some of their initial experiences that they may recall related to financial decision-making are those where they're in the grocery store with their parents shopping.

Ariana: In some of her research with the University of Michigan, the team found that kids as young as five had emotional reactions to money, things like spending it and saving it. And that these reactions could translate into their own spending behaviors.

Margaret: So how children see you engage with money, react to money, and even the autonomy that parents will allow their children to have with money, particularly as they age, will culminate in healthier, better financial practices later in early adulthood, as well as later adulthood.

Ariana: "But kids now," she says, "Are having money experiences early on that are quite different from generations before them." First off, kids aren't seeing physical money as much. Echelbarger says, "We don't know yet what the implications are for children. Kids who've grown up in a world where money's mostly digital are just now starting to make financial decisions of their own."

Margaret: The changing landscape of money is having this influence on how children come to learn about it and engage with the economy, and I am very curious to know what the downstream implications are, particularly when they go off to college or obtain their own first full-time positions and what that means for their own financial decision-making.

Ariana: So back to what we do know. Kids know about money from very early on.

Margaret: So young children almost from the day they're born are exposed to some type of social media, be that even just videos on YouTube that their parent might put on while their parent is trying to cook dinner. They might see advertisements.

Ariana: We mentioned at the beginning some of the ways that kids are seeing content with all sorts of messages, hidden and overt, about money. But I think it needs to be laid out a little more. A survey published in 2021 by the nonprofit research organization Common Sense Media found that the average daily screen time among kids eight to 12 years old was about 5 1/2 hours, while teens had a screen time average of over eight hours per day. And the two leading apps for kids? TikTok and YouTube. Despite advertisements being around for awhile, this time online means so many more advertisements are coming across their screens.

Margaret: Where my biggest concern is is making sure that children understand that when they're seeing a piece of content, do they know whether that content is an advertisement or not? And so the ability that children have to discern these different types of content and the persuasive intent of advertisements themselves is not something that they're so adept at when they're younger. And in addition to that, you also have games.

Ariana: Games. Yep, it's a relatively recent example of how kids are engaging with money early on. Buying digital outfits, powers, levels, and abilities with online currency, like gems, coins, or V-Bucks, if you know Fortnite. And that means the kind of money kids want can be connected to how they wanna spend it.

Sarah: They're already online, so it's very natural for them. It's a way of being in control of their finances and not necessarily having to ask their mom and dad for every single little purchase.

Ariana: That's Sarah Needleman. She's a tech reporter for "The Wall Street Journal," with a focus on video games and social media. She's looked into how kids are wanting money in more ways than just cold, hard cash.

Sarah: Some of the parents I spoke to, they said they would hand their kids cash and the kids would hand it right back and say, "Nope, I want Robux or Minecraft coins or V-Bucks for Fortnite."

Ariana: Roblox is actually a really good example. It's one of the most popular kids online game platforms. 28 million of its 65.5 million daily users are under the age of 13. Sarah says she learned about how kids are spending money there through her own daughter.

Sarah: A couple of years ago, she wrote a note to the Tooth Fairy and said, "Instead of paying me in cash for my tooth, please pay me in Robux or Minecraft coins." And I saw the note and I said I would make sure the Tooth Fairy would get it, and hopefully she's tech-savvy enough to understand. And then miraculously the next day, the tooth was gone and the Roblox account was full. So she seems to be a very tech-savvy Tooth Fairy.

Ariana: Sarah says, "Robux and other virtual currencies are changing how kids and parents are talking about money early on, with some parents even handing out allowances in the form of digital currency."

Sarah: Parents are treating it like they have always treated traditional payments in terms of an allowance. Children today are growing up with iPads in their hands from early age. This is very natural to them.

Ariana: And then, when kids decide what they wanna spend it on in the online world, it's very similar to deciding how to buy something in real life.

Sarah: A lotta these ways these virtual goods are promoted is just like in real stores. They're trying to get you to spend. There's, you know, flash sales, limited time only, or this is a rare pet.

Ariana: And that digital purchase, it's something that's truly theirs, which Sarah says matters a lot.

Sarah: For children, I think it's a little bit easier for them to have a little bit of something of their own, to have Robux or Minecraft coins or V-Bucks. That's just different from what their parents have, and they can go ahead and spend it as they see fit.

Ariana: And it's a lot of money they're spending. Forrester Research estimated that in 2021, children 12 to 17 spent an average of $92 a month online. But despite all that money floating around online, Margaret Echelbarger from Stony Brook says that with kids, the link between virtual money and real money habits is fuzzy.

Margaret: The extent to which children understand that there's this mapping between Robux and, you know, actual bucks is somewhat of an open question. And so they're participating in the market whether they know it or not from a very young age.

Ariana: But "WSJ" reporter Sarah Needleman says, "As kids get older, that link becomes more clear."

Sarah: The older they are, the more they understand the dynamics of what's going on here. But generally speaking, they realize that real money has to be used to purchase virtual currency. Although I will say in some games, you can earn virtual currency just by grinding, just by playing your way through.

Ariana: Robux, V-Bucks, coins, gems, all of that is virtual money. But Sarah has seen in her reporting that they can have real-life implications for a kid's financial decision-making.

Sarah: Some of the parents told me that they did have these painful conversations with children who were very sad, because they spent all their virtual currency on one item and then quickly regretted it. And in the virtual world, there's no such thing as returns.

Ariana: On the plus side, Sarah says that this can give them the opportunity to get that first taste of financial freedom.

Sarah: Here's their little bit of an opportunity, a little taste of making that decision. And sometimes they make the wrong one, they learn from it.

Ariana: And that's where people like Echelbarger also see an opportunity.

Margaret: I think it's really important that we engage with the children in our lives about money. And so these sorts of conversations aren't just necessarily having to take place between parents and children. From a very early age, children display this sophisticated understanding of the market. So let's capitalize on that. Let's harness their curiosity and help them become good consumers across the lifespan.

Ariana: And some kids are taking advantage of that opportunity. Next Wednesday, we'll hear some of the different ways that kids are making money now and the tools they're using to turn traditional businesses like lemonade stands into online brands. That's it for "Your Money Briefing." This episode was hosted and produced by me, Ariana Aspuru. It was mixed and scored by Jessica Fenton. Jonathan Sanders is our booking producer. Our supervising producer is Melony Roy. Aisha Al-Muslim is our development producer. Scott Saloway and Chris Zinsli are our deputy editors. And Philana Patterson is "The Wall Street Journal's" head of news audio. We'll be back tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.

WSJ's Your Money Briefing podcast is your personal-finance and career checklist. Finance reporters and experts break down complicated money questions every weekday to help you make better decisions about managing your money. 