If your child gets an allowance or frequently gets gift money, talking with your child about making the best use of it can be very helpful.

Let’s say that your child wants a scooter as so many do now and is going to use his/her own money to buy one. You can go help your child comparison shop by going through the ads, visiting different stores, and even looking through the classifieds to see if there is a good used scooter out there.

Don’t feel that you have to limit this involvement to major purchases. You can help your teenage child see that if (s)he goes to movies, (s)he can go to bargain matinees and arrive already fed so (s)he doesn’t so crave the overpriced snacks they have in the theater.

Let Your Child Participate in Your Own Budgeting

If, for example, you use grocery coupons, you can show your child how your system works. If you are about to make a larger purchase that involves comparison shopping, you can involve your child in the research and decision-making. Do this consistently and your child will begin to learn these skills.

Prepare Your Child for the Media Onslaught

They’re out there everywhere, those ads that say, "spend, spend, spend."

Who can forget those ever-present ads that end with "For everything else there’s MasterCard?" Many children and teenagers learn their financial habits by default from those commercials.

A little time watching and analyzing the commercials with your children can be time well-spent. Even though your child may not relate to the MasterCard commercial, you can find commercials out there that encourage children to spend (or ask you to spend) money frivolously. Certainly a number of cereal ads or toy store ads fit the bill there.

Spend time going over these ads with your child.

Give Your Child Wise Purchase Money

One budget-conscious friend of mine cringed when her teenage daughter wanted a $50 t-shirt from one particularly high-end national chain. She figured it was Christmas, so why not and sometimes that’s okay.

Sometimes when your teenage or adult children hit you up for money for pure extravagance as the couple wanting the refrigerator did, it may be wise to use the occasion as a teachable moment and give, instead, a wise purchase fund.

Take the couple with the refrigerator. Maybe instead of fronting the money for the overpriced refrigerator, offer to buy a more average-priced refrigerator and then offer several hundred dollars of wise purchase money.

The parents (who happen to be very thrifty themselves) could sit down with the couple and show them how to get good quality furnishings at reasonable prices and offer to give toward some wise purchases. They could search together, for example, through the classified ads to see if there is some good quality used furniture from a family moving across the country. They could search the online auctions for accessories.

The mother with the daughter wanting the $50 t-shirt could offer a gift certificate to an upscale closeout store such as Ross’ or Marshall’s.