In a recent article, Dr. Ashley LeBaron-Black and colleagues[1] explored the association between parental financial education during a child's upbringing and the financial wellbeing of those children as they transition into emerging adulthood.   

If you’ve read anything on this website, you’ve learned that parents have a significant impact on their child’s thoughts, beliefs and behaviors surrounding money. Even emerging adults report how their parents’ actions are still impacting them. A recent study[1] by Dr. Joyce Serido and other researchers focused on how emerging adults retrospectively viewed how they were parented and how it affects their financial habits and personal wellbeing in their first year of college.

Dr. Kristy Archuleta and colleagues studied[1] 180 college students who sought financial counseling. Their objective was to explore the impact of financial concerns on individuals’ mental well-being. The investigation delved into various factors, including debt, individuals’ satisfaction with their financial situation, and their knowledge of finances, aiming to discern the relationships between these factors and the experience of financial stress. The primary focus of the study was to uncover the influence of student debt on an individual’s financial anxiety.

The years following high school are a time of financial change and stress.[1] High school graduates who opt for a college education often find themselves trading home-cooked meals for microwave ramen. Many college students find themselves with limited funding throughout their education, often graduating with debt.[2] Lacking funds increases the importance of healthy financial habits. After all, to some degree financial success is less about how much you have, and more about how you handle what you have. However, many students do not have the financial resources and information needed to successfully navigate these years. Are there ways in which these young adults can enter college better prepared?

As a student amid many classes, bogged down by assignments and under pressure to learn a mountain of material, it may seem that the student alone is responsible for their own academic success. However, family economics research has shown that this is not completely true. While personal responsibility is undoubtedly needed for academic success, a student’s educational journey is impacted by a range of variables from government policies to parenting style. In Dr. Xiaohui (Sophie) Li’s article, What Impacts Young Generations’ School/College Education Through the Lens of Family Economics? A Review on JFEI Publications in the Past Ten Years, Li splits up her discussion of the factors that impact young generations’ education into three categories: the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels of influence.[1] These levels are a way to look at the influences in a person’s life from a broad, big-picture lens (considering influences such as the government or society) to a close, direct lens (such as the family). In doing so, Li provides insight into challenges a student might encounter while obtaining an education.

Sex and money aren’t often mentioned in the same breath, even for married couples. Whether because finances aren’t a particularly romantic subject or because physical intimacy doesn’t seem to factor into the weekly budget, the common view seems to be that these two topics are totally separate. However, these topics do have something clearly in common: neither seems to be an easy topic for couples to discuss, especially when partners feel inexperienced or unhappy with their current situation. Two recent research articles reveal further connections between sex and money.

The phrase “we’re all family here” has become a modern-day workplace staple. Appealing to the need for human belonging, businesses with the best of intentions attempt to create a supportive, collaborative company culture. But the blurring of lines between personal and professional often comes at the expense of one to the other. Tasked with meeting the demands of two “families,” employees inevitably crack under pressure and may underperform in the home and/or workplace. Companies may see better results as they invest in their employees’ actual families, and here’s why:

In a world with information readily available at our fingertips, we often forget about the power of teaching within the home. For example, although children could Google any financial question, what and how they learn about money from their parents (called financial socialization) is the top predictor of their future financial wellbeing.1 The financial literacy gained through these processes will inevitably benefit children later in life as it is applied in emerging adulthood.2,3 Why do children learn more about money from parents than from peers, media, work, or other sources? The home is where children spend most of their time, and the groundwork laid there can have long lasting effects on children’s attitudes and behaviors. There are three primary ways that parents teach children about money: modeling, discussion, and experiential learning.4

How well do today’s emerging adults do when it comes to managing money? For the most part, not as well as we would hope. But that can change. A multi-generational, interview-based project was conducted to better understand what and how parents are teaching their children about finances. Based on the What’s and How’s of Family Financial $ocialization project, researchers have drawn numerous conclusions to assist parents in addressing and shrinking the gap between financially literate and financially illiterate emerging adults.[1]

When you are asked to donate at the cash register, do you do it? Your answer is likely the same as your parents’ answer to this question because children learn financial habits, like whether to donate or not, from their parents and often emulate what they’ve seen their parents do.