Money May Talk, But What Is It Saying and Who Is Listening?

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In a recent post, I emphasized the importance of co-parents finding ways to address their differences of opinion when it comes to how to best manage the financial support of their young adult children.

Learning how to communicate openly about financial matters is crucially important for all couples when it comes to resolving fiscal conflicts, but especially for couples with children, whether the co-parents are married or not.

We all have complicated feelings about what money represents, and we all carry with us long-standing beliefs regarding the best way to generate, save, budget and invest money. As a result, partners in relationships often have misaligned money management strategies and tactics when it comes to how to allocate resources within the family.

These feelings and beliefs, and strategies and tactics, reveal themselves early in and throughout childrearing when it comes to the decisions we make, such as:

1. Should we send our child to public school or spend money on a private school?
2. Should we give our child an allowance and, if so, is the allowance tied to certain chores and responsibilities or not?
3. Should we reinforce good grades in school, or other exemplary acts and behaviors, with monetary rewards?
4. Should we take an extended family vacation or save as much money as possible for emergencies and “rainy days”?
5. As our children grow up, should we pay them for their contributions to household functioning, like mowing the lawn or babysitting a younger sibling, or should these duties be expected to be performed without remuneration?
6. What kind of budget should be in place when it comes to gifts for birthdays or holidays?

The stakes may become even higher when it comes to fiscal decision-making during the stage of early adulthood—these stakes go up because the amount of money being considered may be going up, as well:

1. What is our ceiling when it comes to paying for college, graduate school or vocational training?
2. At what point do we ask a young adult child who is living at home to begin paying some form of rent?
3. Do we invest in our young adult’s fledgling business venture and, if so, how much and for how long?
4. How much money should be earmarked for potentially costly endeavors such as a wedding, or a security deposit for an apartment, or the purchase of a vehicle, or the down payment on a home?
5. Who is responsible for common but necessary expenses such as cellphone plans, or health and auto insurance, and is there any statute of limitations when it comes to how long these should be subsidized?
6. What qualifies as our young adult child’s “need” and what qualifies as a “want” at this stage?

Rare would be the co-parents who find that they were, or are, consistently in agreement when it comes to these kinds of questions.

But how co-parents address these questions is a window into the world of their relationship with each other, as well as into the world of their relationship with their child. And we want that window to be as clear as possible so that we make the best decisions possible.

With this in mind, open communication is crucial. And communication of this sort requires parents to continue to develop relational skills that, even after many years of partnership, still require careful attention. These include:

• Respecting and negotiating differences, and seeing these differences as assets rather than liabilities.

• Seeing your fellow parent as an ally, not an adversary, and envisioning the two of you as sharing the same goal for your emerging adult—self-respect and self-reliance.

• Learning how to respectfully compromise with each other—in other words, finding solutions to complicated problems, solutions that neither partner is totally pleased with, but that each can still live with.

• Recognizing how money has come to represent who has power and who has control within your relationship.

• Recognizing how power and control have been, and currently are, balanced between the two of you, and whether that balance needs to be “re-balanced” at this stage of family life.

• Remembering that honest, thoughtful discussions about money, difficult as they may be, provide couples with limitless opportunities to solidify commitment, build trust, heal old wounds (related and unrelated to money), and deepen self-awareness.