I was going through my binder of story ideas for my monthly Kidnexions Connection newsletter and found a post-it with a story about Nathan.  It’s a good thing I took the time to write the story down because I had forgotten all about it.  So here’s the first in a series I’m calling ‘Flashback’ as I remember or find things my kids did when they were growing up that relates to learning about money.

Sometimes we adults use vocabulary words that don’t always make sense to kids.  It’s hard to do it any other way, though,  since kids  arrive on this planet with little understanding of any words.

But as our kids get older it’s easy to forget that something that makes perfect sense to us makes absolutely no sense to them.  Take the words ‘bounced checks’.  It’s been quite a while since I’ve bounced a check, and that happened because a roommate of mine handed me her rent check without the funds to back it up.   My VERY FIRST mortgage payment in my entire life bounced because of that.  Lesson learned:  just because someone has a full-time job doesn’t mean they have any rent money.  And there’s a reason people collect first and last month’s rent.

But back to Nathan.  I’m not sure what the context was, but apparently I had used the words ‘bounced check’ while he was listening.  It was probably something like, “I can’t believe my VERY FIRST mortgage check bounced because she didn’t have the money to pay for rent and never told me…”  But whatever it was, he realized that bouncing checks was not a very smart thing to do.  

Apparently he’d been giving this some thought because he finally came up to me and asked,  “Is it okay to bend checks?”  (He does know what checks are.)  And honestly, I had no idea what he was talking about until he told me that he heard me say that bouncing checks was a bad idea.  It made me wonder what visuals went through his head when he thought of checks bouncing.