Parents Use Video Games to Level up Children's Money Skills

Most parents think that teens are spending way too much time playing video games, and experts are saying that these parents are missing a great opportunity to teach their children real-life financial literacy at the playing field that their kids enjoy the most.

Tom Martin is not one of those whooping 86 percent of parents that thinks kids these days are spending so much wasted time playing video games.

As a father and a financial planner, Martin knows very much the significance of teaching his children about money. And, his money lessons surprisingly involve video games. As an avid gamer during his young days, he knows how video games can be of help in leveling up kids' money skills.

According to the Entertainment Software Association, 71 percent of children under 18 years old in the United States are so into video gaming. This includes Martin's 2 teenagers, one 13 and the other 15 years.

According to Martin, A lot of these video games" contain the building blocks of basic financial concepts," and he has been able to use them to connect "in-game economies" with real-life money lessons and educational benefits for the kids.

Learn about saving, investing and directing currency

Many parents might be surprised to know that there are video games with a gameplay that consist of "in-game economies." Others, on the other hand, have a gameplay that is entirely built around it like the Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the game Martin's teens love to play.

The premise behind Animal Crossing: New Horizons is very simple. One moves away from home and goes to a deserted island where the player needs to buy a house through getting a mortgage and finding ways to make money to pay off the mortgage.

Unlike real life, the game gives the player unlimited time to pay for the mortgage without interest . However, like in real life, the game has a "stalk market," where players buy turnips, a substitute for stocks, on Sundays and monitor fluctuating prices of these turnips throughout the week to see if they can make a profit.

"There's an income component and personal finance to learn here. We need to learn how to save and determine where to direct our currency in the game," Martin emphasized.

Through the game's components, which are "paying off a mortgage, building infrastructure, investing in the stalk market and finding the best deals through price arbitrage," Martin has been able to open a door to introduce real-life money lessons to his children and show them how some of these components are different from or exactly the same as the real world.

Read Also: Why Parents Should Let Their Children Play Video Games

More than the financial literacy

Director of the Media Psychology Research Center and psychology professor at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, California, Pamela Rutledge, stated that children will not only learn from the content of the game but also from the processes they encounter within the gameplay.

Animal Crossings, according to Douglas Gentile, a psychology professor at Iowa State University, is a game that has "pro-social set of effects." It allows children to learn about the importance of having a sense of community, where empathy for other characters are gained through asking for and giving help.

Gentile further stated that they have done studies in different countries where kids play pro-social games and they discovered that these kids learn about empathy that leads to more cooperative and helpful behaviors.

Rutledge shared to CNET that her daughter plays Roblox and the latter is like a "master negotiator" in the game doing trading of unicorns and other rare things. She may not completely understand what her daughter is doing but she has witnessed how she spends a lot of time developing a strategy to negotiate. Her daughter gets to practice her negotiation skills, which is an important life skill in real life.

Further, she said that video games can be great teachers because they provide instant feedback. As the learning theory stated, there is better learning when feedback is given as compared to not getting any at all.

Kelsey Brothers, a teacher at the JCC Greater Boston Early Learning Center declared that playing video games help children find "intrinsic motivation."

Playing video games allows children to practice pro-social skills, master in-game currencies and solve puzzles through critical thinking. More than all these, children think they are just playing and don't even realize they are already learning. Thus, it is crucial for parents to step in and grab the educational benefits.

Related Article: Playing Video Games May Be Good For Children, Study Shows