My daughter and my son just received two Easter cards in the mail.

As he was opening his, my son, age 4, pulls out a piece of plastic and says, “Look, Mommy, a credit card!”. My wife and I exchanged puzzled looks - and I started to chuckle. “Son, that’s a GIFT card, not a credit card.”

My son is four and we haven’t used a credit card in the last three years. I was a little shocked the he knows what a credit card is. I asked him where he had heard about credit cards. He casually mentioned that he had played with a toy cash register at someone else’s house - and that there were, “three credit cards in it, Daddy”.

I’ve been teaching my kids about money - how to make change, how to count it - but today I had an opportunity to talk to them about debit cards, gift cards, and credit cards. My daughter is eight and she grasped the concepts of ‘earning money and then paying for something’ vs. ‘getting something and paying for it later’ rather quickly. My son learned the difference between his gift card and my debit card.

I love teachable moments.

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