It's Never Too Early To Tell Your Kids About The Ins And Outs of Insurance

Why scare the kids? Let them be kids? I can just let them know that they don’t have to worry….right?

Wrong.

WARNING:  This is not a joyful conversation, but it is a necessary one. Most kids will start to worry about what happens to them, if something happens to you.

Kids live in the real world of instantaneous news. School shootings, earthquakes, terrorists, gang killings, hurricanes, fires, illness, car accidents… you get the picture. Our kids and grandkids know that disasters are real and real people are victims. They are scared. We all are scared.

We grew up with much less media, but we were even conditioned for uncertainty via the fairy tales that were read to us. Think of those. Some disaster had usually befallen the children and they were now going to have to cope with a single parent home and an “Ugly Stepmother” who wanted to kill them, or something even worse. Cinderella was orphaned and became an indentured servant. Sleeping Beauty was victimized by her ugly Stepmother and was put to sleep for 100 years until she was rescued. Hansel and Gretel were also from a broken home and terrorized by some creepy psychopath in the woods. Even the Little Mermaid “lost” her natural habitat and ability to live in the ocean and was sort of forced to find a new home on land.  (Forget the point that the most valued characteristic of the “heroin” was that she was pretty).

Get the point? It is time to lower the stress for your offspring by explaining that you do love them, your children and grandchildren, and that you can’t protect them from every uncertainty, but you want to try to at least keep them as safe as you can…at least financially. There is a financial vehicle that was created just for this called insurance.

Start the conversation off by explaining that insurance can’t help the terrible feelings your young ones will have if they face some disaster, but insurance can help with the money that is needed to make some things better. Begin by having your kids or grandkids think of ways in which someone could lose a lot of money.  They should start to think of things like; earthquakes, fires or hurricanes where people lost houses and had to buy new ones, or illness where people couldn’t work and needed money to live, or car accidents where the person had to spend money to buy a new car, or if a bad person breaks into your house and steals something of yours. (Again, try to move the discussion onto the monetary consequences, although in other articles, I’ll discuss wills and guardianship.)

Here is a simple definition of insurance for a young child: