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Please note: The reports in this section are not product reviews or tests; they're meant to spotlight options for you to consider, as well as milestones in children's online-safety technology development. Comments from readers on their own experiences with these products and services are most welcome - and, with your permission, we publish them. Do email us your own product reviews anytime!
'We-commerce' - e-commerce with kids (Oct. 8, '99 issue)
Teaching kids financial responsibility is very in vogue on the Web these days. It was a hot topic at the Interactive Kids conference we went to in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. What we've found is that, where children are concerned, e-commerce is very much "we-commerce," to borrow a term from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
E-commerce sites aimed at kids and teens, financial institutions, and even a national non-profit organization are working on improving young people's "financial literacy." We saw the trend coming last May, when we first heard about iCanBuy.com (see our review). When we saw its mission, "to enable kids, teens, and parents to manage money wisely," we thought to ourselves, "Good will with parents is certainly good business for e-commerce companies whose customers do not have their own credit cards!"
In addition to iCanBuy, which says it's now working on screening products sold to kids, two other well-intentioned digital-allowance sites are DoughNET.com and Rocket Cash. They promote financial responsibility to varying degrees. Other sites do an end run around the whole issue. Last week we mentioned how SurfMonkey just links shoppers in its "The Mall" directly to e-retailers like eToys. And Flooz.com keeps it simple, too. When kids want to shop, grownups, aka credit-card holders, can just send them Flooz (digital cash - a bit like a gift certificate). Flooz recipients can spend their digital dollars at e-stores affiliated with Flooz.com. Most of the partner retailers are small, but there are a few well-known ones like Tower Records and Eastern Mountain Sports.
The nonprofit organization we mentioned is the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy in Washington, D.C. Jump$tart does research on children's literacy in this area and provides K-12 educational materials aimed at having kids learn personal financial management by the time they graduate from high school. We thought you might find it useful to know why they're doing this: "While some believe personal finance should be taught in the home, the reality is that many parents can't - or won't - address this topic with their children. By not including personal finance in their curriculum, school systems are sending millions of young people into the marketplace without any basic skills in personal finance, putting them at high risk of becoming adults who end up over their heads in debt, in bankruptcy court or without adequate savings to retire" (from a press release in the site).
And Boston-based Fleet Bank's FleetKids has a solution in process. FleetKids uses games to teach children about managing a business, handling currency (Kindness Coupons), setting financial goals, establishing a budget, etc. The winners are schools. More than 1,500 schools around the US have enrolled in the Fleet program, FleetKids project manager Cindy Ho told us. Kids sign up to play for their school "team." All points go toward a team total, and prizes are "technology-based rewards" for the school. Fleet apparently finds financial education (of its future customers?) so important that this Web site doesn't even have a complete Profit and Loss Statement" - just the "L" of the P&L, a Fleet executive said at the Interactive Kids conference a couple of weeks ago. Another financial institution, American Eagle Federal Credit Union, sent a marketing manager to the conference to start gathering information for development of a Web site to teach kids all about credit unions. Even the US Mint's site, mostly an e-commerce opp, has game-filled H.I.P. Pocket Change for kids, complete with a "Teachers' Lounge" that has lesson plans like "Charting History with Pennies."
Does all this make you want to log on and start up your child's digital-allowance account? Which, if any, of these resources do you think make sense for kids? Does fiscal responsibility begin at home? Or do you think children should become "financially literate" at school? Email us your own thoughts and experiences.
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