Your 4-Year-Old Doesn’t Have a Prepaid Credit Card?

The “Happy Meal” toy – the highlight of a McDonald’s meal for most young children. Yet it can be tough trying to explain to youngsters why paying extra for a plushie or plastic trinket may not be the most financially sound decision for the family, commented Yury Rush in an entry for IIR’s Prepaid Expo blog

“I think the bigger issue may be that many parents don’t know how to manage money, themselves, and modeling their behavior is probably doing twice the damage to their children,” wrote Rush.

Odysseas Papadimitriou, CEO and Founder of CardHub.com, in an article for Fox Business advocated stressing money management skills to children at an early age and believes prepaid cards could be a valuable teaching tool. But realistically, is your 4-year-old ready for a prepaid card? The PYMNTS.com community had plenty to say on the subject, and if you haven’t already, we encourage you to share your thoughts below as well.

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“Prepaid cards could also be used in the classroom to teach math. Under the teacher’s guidance, it could work well for grades K through 6.” – Arlene Hauben

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“I love prepaid but 4-years-old is a bit young! My 5-year-old loves nothing more than saving in his piggy bank and spending the money in notes!! Perhaps when he is at school at 11 it will be more appropriate and I will thoroughly encourage prepaid to him! I think 15- to 17-year-olds will be better age to educate, as this is usually the target market for banks to start to retain them  as lifelong customers and then eventually sell them credit cards and loans.” – Sasha Marley

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“Cool! .. credit card addicts ASAP…LOL!!” – Paolo Lioy

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“Prepaid cards are not a good training tool for young children. Like many adults, they have a hard time understanding that the value is dimensioning as you spend. You need to give them cash that they can hoard in a jar and see it grow or decline.

As for Happy Meals, I solved this when my children were young by offering to buy the Happy Meal only if the kids wanted to pay the extra dollar themselves. The toy was almost never worth spending their own money. If it was, they actually played with it more and saw value in it.” – Parent of 2

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“Hey, my 9-year-old daughter knows how to use an iTunes card — that in my book is a prepaid card. So, I agree. The real issue in my view is why no one has really launched yet the parental-controlled, open-loop prepaid card.” – David Parker

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“Here’s an old-fashioned thought — Instead of teaching 4-year-olds how to spend money via a prepaid debit card, why not teach them how to save and deposit money via an ATM card? Spending should not even come into the equation until they at least have the training wheels off their bikes.” – Andrew Falso