So, why is it so hard for us to learn how to manage money?

Why do so many people struggle to make ends meet, even on reasonably high incomes?

Why do so few people manage to provide sufficiently for themselves in retirement?

It’s not rocket science. We know what it takes. And there are some people doing it. So why isn’t basic money management as widely understood as basic geometry?

Imagine what life would be like if making money came as easily and naturally as riding a bike or tying your shoelaces. Imagine graduating high school with a permanent, secure, passive income already in place. You wake each the morning to find more money has appeared in your account overnight! If you want to travel, you do. If you want to paint, write, or do any other creative activity, you do. You choose your occupation based on what you love to do, not the burden of having to pay the bills. You have all the time you need to socialise with your family and friends, to stay in shape, and to practice your spirituality.

This world is not a pipe-dream. It’s not unrealistic. The world is alive with opportunity, more so now than ever before, and the opportunity is expanding exponentially.

With the right knowledge and attitudes, today’s kids can capture their share of that opportunity, and set themselves up for life.

So, why isn’t everyone doing it?

Because not everyone’s parents have the right knowledge and attitudes to pass along to their kids. Some of those who have the knowledge and attitudes are still setting themselves up in life, working long hours, and find it difficult to break the knowledge down into terms their kids can understand.

What can we do about it?

As parents, we need to be conscious that financial education ranks up there with education about nutrition, health, and communication. We must educate ourselves, so that we can educate our children.

There are many places to go on the web to get that vital financial education.

The Cash Smart Kids program (http://www.cash-smart-kids.com) provides lessons for the kids, plus additional reference material for their parents.

The Rich Dad website (http://www.richdad.com) is rich in content, and contains information about the Cashflow series of educational board games.

There are numerous e-Books, ezine articles, and offline financial publications with an online presence.

And, of course, there are dozens of relevant books in your local book store.

In this current Teen Talk episode, Chloe presents the facts about adolescent obesity, analyzes what parents, schools and kids should be doing and offers a few tips. Teen Talk, which caters to today’s technology savvy teenagers, is meant to be highly interactive. Viewers are encouraged to send e-mail and comments on the blog (www.teentalkblog.tv).

Teen Talk is now airing on the Internet via the web sites Kidfluence.tv, YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video and myspace.

There is a special role that a parent can play in the overall academic, physical and social development of a child. Here are some tips on what activities to give importance to and options for various other activities that a child may be interested in.

Needless to say the school and the assignments should take precedence over any other fun-filled or special interest activities. The best way to emphasize the importance of these to your child is to ensure that the days quota of reading, writing and assignments is over before other activities start. If while doing so, you discover that your child has a special interest in a specific academic area like robots or space or animals, do not shy away from aiding the process of discovery and exploration. With the Internet abound with information encourage your child to learn more and share with you the discoveries. You shall be surprised with the wealth of knowledge that your little baby will emerge with.

Social development can be given an impetus by promoting ideas on clubs. These could be reading clubs, library clubs, debate clubs and the like. These can allow your child to participate in story reading sessions and can instill a sense of sharing and being together. Some clubs can also be formed with the purpose of community service in mind and could take on tasks like clean-the-city drives. Social programs can also give your child her first experience in charity, community service and suffering. Volunteering for such programs will enable her to have a sense of achievement.

If you would like to further your child in the pursuit of sports and physical activities, then you could consider enrolling your young tyke in a sports club. Dancing is another form of physical activity that allows for a release of all the energy that is pent up among the kids. The gym can also be a good source of release.

Another option is to involve your child in household activities like cooking, cleaning, watering the plants etc. This will give you a helping hand and at the same time will infuse a familial bonding among the family members.

From the above it is obvious that the need for a school that ahs extracurricular activities after school is not an all-pervading requirement. Rather the absence of the same allows you to get more involved in the all round development of you child.

Although there are various schools of thought on this issue, as well as whole schools devoted to working with students based on a physiologically or emotionally based diagnosis, it is often best to deal with students in a multisensory environment.

Multisensory learning enables students of diverse strengths and weaknesses to experience a powerful tool. Traditional classroom learning requires that students be quiet and not move while learning large bodies of patterns such as multiplication tables. Children learn geometric shapes and conceptual patterns and spatial relationships almost entirely without movement. Using manipulative tools is not uniform and it is often limited to non-instructional time.

Although much time and money has been spent researching learning disabilities in the area of language, little conclusive research is available in the area of general math skills. Math tests require a variety of conceptual and cognitive skills and no single test can pinpoint a deficit which can be alleviated through a specific intervention or technique.

Often, using diagnoses to approach working with a person who has difficulty in math is counterproductive. Mathematics is a rubric which covers many diverse skills and abilities, form language to organization to sequencing to classification and beyond. Some students hope that when they divulge their diagnosis, a math teacher or math tutor will know exactly how to help them. However, even with established research in other areas of diagnosed disabilities there is much which can only be learned in the practical here-and-now of working with the individual student.

The vast majority of students with learning problems are those who find it hard to remember patterns. This impedes their ability to learn the algorithms of multiplication and division. These students often find it hard to recall multiplication tables. Some of them are so motivated that they devise their own methods of remembering these factoids and patterns.

There is help for many students with difficulties in math – also called “dyscalculia,” a vague but clinical-sounding name for difficulties in the general area of mathematical skills. It’s important to keep in mind that diagnosis implies a scientific approach to problems. It often is not. Sometimes the solution lies in rolling up one’s sleeves and doing what intuitively feels right.

Children in third through fifth grades who are having difficulty with procedural operations, such as long division and multi-digit multiplication, very often have not had any kinetic activity associated with the learning of the multiplication tables which are the basis for their computations. They become distracted from the procedures of multiplication and division by their concern over the “blank space” in their knowledge of multiplication tables and they lose momentum.

Parents often say that they download tables form the Internet or they use flash cards. Another, perhaps better, alternative is to provide art and craft materials for the student to use in writing his or her own personal multiplication tables. When the tables are personalized and used frequently with pride and familiarity, students gain in experience, confidence and expertise.

Children tend to enjoy having their own personally crafted multiplication tables from 1×1 through 12×12. They use these with pride and confidence. Even taking them to the supermarket to compute the total cost of multiple items will help to make the applications of arithmetic real and valued to a child.

Making a child’s learning experiential is of utmost importance in creating interest in math and developing skills. Many are not aware of the essential uses of elementary mathematical and spatial concepts in daily lives. Heightening awareness of these events is essential to pointing them out to children and sharing experience with them.

Just as parents read to our children, so should they communicate a reliance on mathematical principles. This may vary from family to family depending on individual pursuits and interests. For some families whose common interest is sports competition, a short discussion of the role of sports statistics could make that dreaded skills homework more interesting and relevant to a child’s life. Others may be interested in video games, which use computer programming that requires trigonometric applications. Cartoon animation programming uses principles of topology, the mathematics of mapping in space.

Road trips and map reading are also mathematical adventures for parents to share with children. Topographical maps use numbers in an obvious way, while road maps with scale measurements open the discussion to ratios and scale.

The history of measurement and attempts at standardization can become real when discussing money or the differences among the metric, imperial and U.S. measurement systems.

Toddlers, even with a rudimentary understanding of concrete quantity, can enjoy games of “which is less and which is more?” Counting games and rhymes abound and have been traditionally used to accustom children to quantitative symbols even at very young ages.

Perhaps the most useful tool of all in developing a child’s math ability at an early age is precision in language. Most students who have experienced the “drill and kill” math experience in school are shocked when they start to solve math word problems as a mathematical exercise. These applications of the skills so long deemed to be the foundation of math education are daunting to children who have been trained to believe that mathematical studies begin and end with computation.

If children learn mathematics as a foreign language, with symbols and grammar of its own, they are better able to handle the rigors of higher mathematics – with its whole new set of symbols and logic – and they are more productive students. Reading to a child, discussing concepts of “more and less,” “before and after,” “twice as much” and hierarchical classifications such as supermarket shelf organization and street name organization can pay off in a child’s mathematical performance.

Organization is the key to success in solving math problems. Giving a child adequate writing materials and encouraging him or her to experiment with blocking his work with designs to make it easier to read when he checks his work. Organizing work and establishing a rhythm for work is essential to success at problem solving. It is well worth the expense of large paper, markers and even colored pencils to establish the habit of conceptual organization.

So it really is not all about numbers, but it is about the ability to organize, translate concepts and think inductively and deductively. Many skills and experiences contribute to those goals and – with parental involvement – children can improve their quantitative skills while enjoying the simple pleasures of life.