A reader writes:
Last term I asked my Year 9 tutor group a simple question during a spare ten minutes: “Who owns the house you live in?” Out of twenty-eight fourteen-year-olds, about half said “my mum” or “my dad”. A few said “the council”. Several said, with complete confidence, “us”. Two said they had never thought about it. When I asked what a mortgage was, one boy said it was “like a bill for the house”, which is not bad, and a girl said it was “when you die and they read out who gets your stuff”. That one stayed with me.
These are bright young people. They can tell you the resale value of a particular pair of trainers to the pound. They know which phone contract gives the most data. But the biggest financial decisions most of them will ever make, where to live, whether to rent or buy, how to deal with the family land back home, are a complete mystery to them. And I don’t blame them. Nobody has told them.
I am a maths teacher, second-generation, parents from Trinidad. I grew up in a flat in Lewisham where money was never discussed in front of children. Bills arrived, and my mother’s face changed, and that was all I knew. When my father bought a house when I was sixteen, I found out the day we moved. When my grandmother died and there was a question about her house in Arima, I only learned about it years later, and only because my aunt was still angry.
My view is simple. We are sending children out into the world without the basic knowledge they need to keep a roof over their heads. And many of our families, especially church families, keep them in the dark out of a mixture of privacy, embarrassment and the old idea that “children should be seen and not heard” about grown folks’ business.
I am not saying we should frighten children with the full weight of adult worries. There is a big difference between telling a ten-year-old “we are behind on the rent and might be evicted” and telling them “the rent is the biggest thing we pay each month, and this is roughly how we plan for it”. The first is a burden. The second is an education.
Here are some things I think children could learn at home, at different ages, that most of mine never have:
- Around eight or nine: that a home costs money every month, and roughly what the main costs are. Rent or mortgage, electricity, water, food.
- Around twelve: the difference between renting and owning, in simple terms. Who the landlord is. What a deposit is. Why you look after a rented place properly.
- Around fifteen: what a mortgage actually is, what interest means, why credit history matters, and that buying a house usually takes years of saving.
- Before they leave home: how to read a tenancy agreement, how to budget for a first flat, and the family story. Is there land? Whose name is it in? What happened to Grandma’s house?
That last one matters more than people think. So many Caribbean families have land or houses “back home” that the younger generation in the diaspora knows nothing about. Then someone dies, and a cousin in Florida or a neighbour in the village has been farming it for twenty years, and nobody here even knows where the papers are. We cannot expect our children to look after an inheritance they have never been told exists.
I also think churches could do much more. We run youth programmes on purity and peer pressure and careers, which is good. Why not an evening on “Your first flat”? Why not ask a member who works at a bank, or a surveyor, or a housing officer, to talk to the teenagers for an hour? Scripture says a lot about land, inheritance, debt, work and wisdom. Proverbs is practically a textbook on household management. We just rarely connect it to the practical questions our young people will face.
I have started doing a small thing with my own children, who are eleven and thirteen. Once a month, when I pay the bills, I sit them down for fifteen minutes and show them a few of the numbers. Not all of them. Just enough. The electricity bill and why it went up in winter. What the mortgage payment is and how many more years we have. My daughter was astonished that we would still be paying for the house when she was at university. My son wanted to know if we could “pay it all off at once” and we ended up having a whole conversation about interest, which is more than I got in five years of school maths.
Deuteronomy tells parents to teach God’s ways to their children “when you sit in your house” (Deuteronomy 6:7). I believe that includes teaching them how to keep a house, not just how to behave in one. Our children will inherit our homes, our land and our debts whether we talk about them or not. Better that they hear about it from us, at the kitchen table, than from a solicitor’s letter.
— Mrs K.J., Croydon
Editor’s note
Mrs J.’s letter makes a strong case that practical knowledge about homes and property is part of raising children well. Her suggestion of a short monthly “bills conversation” is simple and easy to copy, and her distinction between burdening children with worry and educating them with age-appropriate information is an important one. Families with land or property abroad may want to take special note: telling the next generation what exists, where the papers are, and whose name they are in, is one of the most useful things a parent can do.
Reader letters may be edited for length and clarity, and names and identifying details are changed.
Follow Jamaica Homes on Youtube @jamaicahomes and Instagram @jamaica_homes and on Facebook @jamaicahomesnews Send us a message or email us at onlinefeedback@jamaica-homes.com or editor@jamaica-homes.com
Visit our YouTube Community ↗