What money values are we passing on to our kids?

So, I bought myself an expensive watch.

I remember standing at the counter, already half aware of how the story would sound if I told it out loud. I bought it anyway. I thought spending something significant would somehow make the achievement feel as significant as it was supposed to. Instead, I mostly remember realizing I had spent a bunch of money. The watch itself wasn’t a bad purchase. It has held its value and may even appreciate, and it’s sitting safely in a box somewhere I’ll one day pass on to my daughter. But that isn’t why I bought it, and somewhere in the process I had a genuine moment of clarity: I don’t need things to feel good. I need to do good to feel good. Work harder, create value, help people and businesses—that was the stuff that gave the achievement substance. The watch was just the trapping.

That was the first time I understood the difference between being money-minded and being money-conscious.

Where the values come from

Money values are usually described as something handed down, a lesson from a parent, a habit absorbed at the dinner table. How that handing-down actually happens matters more than most of us assume.

Research into family financial socialization consistently finds that parental actions have a greater impact on a child’s financial capability than explicit financial education, including the kind taught in school. Children absorb far more from watching what their parents do with money than from what their parents tell them to do with it. The same research found that 90% of children say they would go to their parents for advice about money. Only 60% of parents feel confident enough to have that conversation.

I was raised to believe that stuff mattered: how much something cost, what kind of car someone drove, what success looked like from the outside. Nobody sat me down and taught me that directly. It was simply the world I grew up in, absorbed by watching rather than being told. At some point I realized I didn’t believe any of it. That wasn’t a process of unlearning so much as it was one of self-discovery, figuring out which of those inherited values I actually aligned with.

The yardstick can change

For much of my early career I worked with major automotive brands, and as part of those contracts I was given a car to drive. The vehicles rotated every six to twelve months to protect their resale value and I got used to always having the nice car.

Then one rotation, they switched me into something smaller and considerably less impressive. I was livid. How could they do this to me?

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I had no choice but to accept it and after driving it for a few days, I realised I was saving a meaningful amount on gas. It was a perfectly cute car, and it got me from point A to point B exactly as well as the last few had.

Nothing about my work had changed. Nothing about my success had changed. The only thing that had changed was the instrument I was using to measure it. That, I think, is the clearest definition of money-mindedness I can offer: caring more about the yardstick than about what it’s supposed to be measuring.

Money-consciousness, by contrast, isn’t about spending less. I drive a modest car today because I like it and it does the job, not because I’ve sworn off nice things. But travel matters enormously to me, and I take every trip I can. I go to every concert I want to go to. Net-net, I probably spend about the same as most people I know. The difference is where I’ve decided the value lives.

Then you become the one doing the modeling

If children learn primarily by watching rather than by being told, my daughter is already learning something from how I spend, what I don’t spend on, and what I talk about at home. She hears me talk about money constantly, because I work in financial services and write a personal finance column. I have no real control over what she’s absorbing from any of that, and neither does anyone raising a child within earshot of their own financial life.

What I can control, a little, is what I model on purpose rather than by accident. I’m not trying to teach her that expensive things are bad. I’m trying to make sure that if we ever buy her a car, the reasoning she overhears is about getting from point A to point B safely, not about what the car says about her to anyone else. She can decide for herself, later, whether a nicer car is worth working toward. That will be her yardstick to build, not mine to hand her pre-assembled.

The environment doing the modeling too

There was always peer pressure growing up, always advertising, always things we wanted simply because someone else had them. But when I was a kid, my peers were mostly the people physically around me. You saw what your friends had, watched a favourite athlete endorse a product on television, and either could or couldn’t afford it.

Now, comparison is constant and global, and the gap between wanting and having has nearly disappeared. An influencer suggests you need something, and it can be in your hands within a day. The message has shifted from “look what other people have,” to “look what other people have, and you can have it too.” It is aimed at an audience that includes children who haven’t yet developed the instinct to question it.

Research released this year by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health found that online sports betting among Ontario students in grades 7 to 12 rose from 1% in 2019 to 10% in 2025, a tenfold increase in six years, with nearly a quarter of students saying they see gambling advertising every day. That statistic isn’t only about gambling. It’s a measure of how early money, consumption and the promise of getting more can now enter a young person’s world.

Through some of my work, I see firsthand what happens when people find themselves in debt. Though my role keeps me a few steps removed from the front line, I see enough to know what money can do to a life when things go wrong. The culture children are growing up in is very good at linking money to status, entertainment and winning. Parents were never the only teacher in the room, but now we’re just increasingly outnumbered.

The question worth asking

I don’t think the goal is to protect a child from ever becoming money-minded, or to guarantee they land wherever we did. Too much of a person’s formation is caught rather than taught for that to be realistic. What is possible, for any of us, is getting sharper at asking one question before a purchase rather than after: do I want this because I value it, or because someone told me it was supposed to mean something?

I couldn’t answer that honestly standing at the watch counter. I could answer it sometime later, driving a smaller car and feeling embarrassed at how much that had rattled me. That gap, between the purchase and the honest answer, is where the real work happens. Not in a single lesson, but in asking the question, repeatedly. There’s no final checkout, only the asking.

Read more tips for newcomers to Canada:

• Bigger Alberta Child and Family Benefit payments going out soon
• What we lost when spending got easier
• Canada’s credit system is a minefield for newcomers—but it’s improving
• The best financial lesson I learned in Canada wasn’t about investing, it was about trust

About Vickram Agarwal

Vickram Agarwal is a multiple-time founder and award-winning entrepreneur. He leads S1:E2, a business strategy consulting firm, and contributes to The Globe and Mail, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Inc.

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