Parenting can get tricky with time. Often parents are torn between giving a luxury life to their children and teaching them the values and skills in life and thereby being strict with them. Every parent wants to provide their kids with the best in the world. However, it is also important to teach them the tricks and skills which they will need later in life to navigate through it smoothly. Money is an important skill to learn – how to financially be stable, how to spend money intelligently and how to save. When children are young, often parents handle their financial matters. But in the process, do they start to weaponise money against their children?
Addressing this, psychotherapist Emily H Sanders wrote, “Money can be weaponised by a parent to emotionally manipulate and control. Often, the grasp for financial control does not end when the child becomes an adult- these familial, financial dynamics typically carry on continue on into the child’s adulthood.”
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Emily further noted down a few instances where money may be weaponised by parents against their children:
Giving gifts: Often buying gifts for kids comes with the unspoken string of making them feel guilty about it later.
Extra money: Often parents express displeasure to a child by giving him less money than the other one. This can mentally affect the child.
Financial help: Sometimes the decisions taken by the child may not be approved by the parent. In such cases, the parent refuses to provide financial help to the child, expressing financial dominance.
Taking away gifts: Giving gifts and finances and then taking them away without any explanation is another way of weaponising money.
Barter system: often parents promise a gift in exchange for a criterion to be matched. But they keep moving the goal further, thereby not keeping the promise.
Access: Often parents withhold the money given to the child by someone else, thereby refusing access of the child to their own money.
Financial bind: Approving a large buy for the child and not paying them the money, thereby putting the child in a financial bind.