Our little financial analyst

I was reading a little anecdotal story about a middle-aged guy remembering the first time he went to the sweet shop by himself at the age of about four – he paid for his sweets with cherry stones, and the shop owner was gracious enough to accept his currency and give him a few pennies back in change.

Cute story, but I couldn’t help thinking how unlikely it would be today. Nikhil certainly knows the difference between money and cherry stones. I am amazed at how much (and amused at how little) he knows about money.
He knows enough to demand money to spend at OK “Bazaars”, and throw a tantrum if he doesn’t get it. Incidentally, the nanny started calling it “OK Bazaars” and we followed suit, otherwise he would think we were going to the shop every time we said “Okay”.
A typical Tuesday afternoon conversation will go like this:
Nikhil: I want a pear.
Me: We don’t have any pears. Have an apple/ peach/ plum.
Nikhil: I want a pear! You must go to OK Bazaars and buy pears.
Me: Look at this lovely apple. Do you want one?
Nikhil: I want money.
Me: (Stunned) What do you want to do with money?
Nikhil: I want to go to OK Bazaars. I want to buy pears, and eggs and bread and newspaper and lollipop and chippies.
Me: I don’t have any money.
Nikhil: Go to work and buy money!

His great grandmother just gave him a birthday present – a traditional Chinese red envelope containing money, so Brad allowed him to handle the R100 note and told him who gave it to him. Nikhil was enchanted – he examined the note, crumpled it, tasted it, said “Thank you Tai-Po”, even though she was nowhere around, and refused to let us take it back. About 2 minutes later, though, he abandoned it on the lawn and found something else to amuse himself.

I’ve decided to use the money to give him an allowance – he gets R5 a week (the nanny is the appointed trustee) to spend at OK Bazaars. The poor nanny sometimes ends up spending her own money giving in to his ceaseless demands. Now he can buy his own eggs and bread and newspaper and lollipop and chippies about twice a week. We’ll work on actual values once he’s progressed past counting and can actually do some arithmetic! At the moment he firmly believes he can get eggs and bread and newspaper and lollipop and chippies for twenty cents. I don’t think I've ever bought eggs from OK Bazaars, but I know better than to mess with a 2-year-old’s ideas.

Recently, while walking around the lake near my parents’ house, Nikhil kept pointing at all the bottle caps littering the ground and calling them money. I was trying to explain to him that they weren’t money, but I didn’t have any coins handy to show him the difference, when we serendipitously found a R1 coin on the ground. I think I was more excited than Nikhil, and I promptly sent him off to the corner café with my dad to spend his windfall.
Now I’m just waiting for the day I say “I don’t have any money,” and he replies “Go outside and pick some up off the ground!” If only…