Mini-Chaos has started pretend playing with "money" in a couple of different ways. When we go outside to go on a walk he often says, "oh! I forgot my money" and runs back to the front door for a second to pretend to grab it. He also gets stacks of cards from his games and says, "do you want some money?" I'm not sure where he learned the concept of money like that - because I've been running wallet-zero since before he was born by carrying only my phone with a credit card inside and Mrs.Chaos made the transition to wallet-zero in the past couple of years too. There's this cute little Wheels on the Bus video we watch, and in it the Panda Bear holds his RFID card up to the scanner as he boards - "The money on the bus goes *beep* *beep* *beep*."
We're to give him this little piggy bank with the different sections (spend, save, give) so he might be able to start earning a little bit of money for being extra helpful around the house. But man, we're going to have to go to the bank to withdraw money to pay him with. He is going to have only the vaguest uses of physical money in his life. It's going to be really tough to teach a three year old how to balance his checkbook before he can do math with numbers. Can someone kickstart a little re-loadable charge card with an LCD screen that helps a 3yo to visualize how much money he has on the card? And how many more years until Mini-Chaos gets a wearable on he can use to spend money?
Anyway - we’ll need to start our discussion of money by talking about how NFC payments work from smart watches.