Why your kids have no idea what things actually cost
Last Christmas, I asked my son what he wanted from Santa. He said “a drone.” Not just any drone - one costing £800.
It dawned on me that he knew the number. He just had no idea what it meant.
To a child growing up today, money isn’t a stack of coins or the weight of a wallet. It’s a flashing green light at a card reader. There’s no visible connection between the amount they have, what things cost, and the time or effort required to turn one into the other. The number exists. The work behind it doesn’t.
In the modern digital age, this disconnect is more profound than at any point in history. Children rarely see or feel real money. We’ve entered an era of frictionless spending — convenient for us, devastating for them. A £200 grocery shop and a £3 coffee look identical from the other side of a contactless terminal.
The Tap-and-Go Generation
This isn’t just technology advancing. It’s a deliberate commercial decision.
In 2013, cash accounted for 51% of all UK payments. By 2023, that figure had fallen to 12%. Only 8% of UK adults now use cash all of the time. Retailers didn’t stumble into this - they engineered it. They spent years removing friction from the buying process because they know that when paying is effortless, people spend more without hesitation.
For children, that friction was never just an inconvenience. It was the lesson.
As one expert from LINK put it: “If you hand over cash, you physically realise you’re losing it.” That physical sensation - the weight leaving your hand, the pile getting smaller - was the earliest financial education most of us ever received.
I remember opening my piggy bank and sorting the coins into silver and bronze piles. Counting the pound coins. Feeling the heft of it. I knew, in a way that required no explanation, that money was finite.
Those days are long gone.
I’ve been thinking about this problem long enough that I built something around it. Morechard is a family finance app designed to make the connection between money, effort, and reward visible again - for kids and parents alike. If that resonates, take a look.