What Are You Accidentally Teaching Your Kids About Money?
Jon Huber’s mom did not set out to raise an entrepreneur. She was just a single mom driving her kid around, and she happened to fill those car rides with Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, and Carlton Sheets cassette tapes because that was what she was listening to at the time. Jon absorbed all of it before he was old enough to know what any of it meant, and by the time he was twelve years old he was writing formal business proposals to his mom explaining why she should buy him a moped and what the return on her investment would be.
She did not teach him that. She just modeled it without realizing she was modeling anything at all.
I love that story because it raises an uncomfortable question for every entrepreneur dad sitting here reading this. What is happening in your house right now that you are not paying attention to? What are your kids absorbing about money, about work, about what success looks like, not from the conversations you are intentionally having with them but from the thousand small things they are watching you do every single day?
Because here is what I can tell you from my own experience. The lessons your kids learn about money are almost never the ones you planned to teach them.
I Was Paycheck to Paycheck Until My Wife Fixed Me
I will be straightforward about this because I think it is important and because I suspect a lot of men reading this are going to recognize themselves in it. Nobody in my house growing up taught me anything about money, business, or financial success. Not because my parents were bad people, they were not. My mom raised me in a Christian home, brought me to church every Sunday, and taught me what it meant to be a good human being. My dad showed me what hard work looks like and what it means to support your family even when you do not have much to work with. Those are not small things and I do not want to minimize them.
But when it came to money specifically, there was simply no framework. Nobody talked about it, nobody modeled healthy financial habits, and I carried that gap straight into adulthood without even knowing it was a gap.
I spent every military paycheck inside of two weeks because I knew another one was coming. That was my entire financial strategy for years. The government was going to deposit money in my account in fourteen days, so I had fourteen days to spend what I had. I was not reckless exactly, I was just completely untethered from any concept of building, saving, or investing because nobody had ever shown me what that looked like or why it mattered.
It was not until I married Raquel that something shifted. She thought about money differently than I did, approached it with more intentionality and discipline, and being close to that every day started to rewire how I saw the whole thing. I did not read a book and have a breakthrough. I married someone whose relationship with money was healthier than mine and I paid attention.
That is the power of proximity. And it cuts both ways, because your kids are in proximity to you every single day.
Money Is a Tool, Not a Trophy
The framework I use now when I talk to my kids about money is pretty simple and it comes from two places, my own hard-won experience and Scripture.
Money is a tool. That is it. It is not something to be glorified, not something to chase for its own sake, not a measure of your worth as a man or a father or a human being. It is a tool that helps you do things, spend more time with the people you love, take care of your family, serve others, build something that matters. Like any tool it can be used well or it can be used poorly. It can be used humbly or it can be used to gloat. The tool itself is neutral. The person holding it is not.
I come back to the parable of the talents regularly with my kids, and I love it for a reason that goes beyond the financial application. Talent is a homograph. In the Bible a talent was a large sum of money, roughly equal to 20 years’ wages for a typical worker, but today the word talent means a natural gift or ability, and I think that overlap is worth leaning into. The lesson of the parable is that you do not bury what you have been given. You do not let it sit dormant. You take what God put in your hands, whether that is money or skill or time or opportunity, and you put it to work. You multiply it. You steward it well and then you account for what you did with it.
My goal is not to raise kids who are rich. My goal is to raise kids who are wise, who understand that what they have been given comes with responsibility, and who know the difference between using money as a vehicle for good and using it as a scoreboard.
Sacred Sundays and the Myth of Work-Life Balance
Jon Huber has what he calls Sacred Sundays, a hard rule in his house that Sunday belongs entirely to the family with no business allowed. I respect that discipline genuinely. But I want to be honest that my version of this looks different, and I think that is okay.
I do not have a single non-negotiable day that is locked off from work every week without exception. Right now on a Sunday after church, one of my kids is learning to code, another one is practicing golf, and I am getting work done. That is just the reality of the season I am in and the way I have structured my life.
What I do have is flexibility that most people who work traditional schedules will never have, and I have built that flexibility intentionally because of my family. Yesterday we spent the entire day together, went to a birthday party, had friends and family over, played around the house, and nobody checked a work app once. That was a Saturday. Next week it might be a Tuesday. The point is not which day is protected. The point is that the time exists and that it is real and that it belongs to them.
The myth of work-life balance is that it has to look the same every week. What actually matters is that your family gets enough of you, enough of your presence, enough of your attention, enough of the version of you that is not staring at a phone or mentally somewhere else. How you structure that is between you and your family. Just make sure it is actually happening and not just something you intend to do someday.
The Practical Side of This
Here is how to start being more intentional about what your kids are learning from you about money and work.
Ask yourself what your kids would say money is for if someone asked them today. Not what you have told them. What they would actually say based on what they have observed. If the answer makes you uncomfortable, you have some work to do. If it makes you proud, keep going.
Introduce the parable of the talents before your kids are old enough to argue with it. You do not need a formal lesson. You just need to talk about it naturally in the context of real life. When your kid finds something they are good at, connect it to stewardship. When they earn money, talk about what they are going to do with it and why. Plant the seed early and water it consistently.
Be honest with your kids about your own financial journey. I tell my kids that I spent every paycheck I made for years because nobody taught me differently. That honesty serves two purposes. It shows them that financial wisdom is something you build, not something you are born with, and it gives them permission to learn without shame if they make mistakes along the way.
Find your version of Sacred Sunday and make it real. It does not have to be Sunday. It does not have to be a full day. But there needs to be protected time that your family can count on, time when you are fully present and not partially somewhere else. Figure out what that looks like in your life and then guard it like it matters, because it does.
Watch what you are accidentally teaching. Jon Huber’s mom was not trying to raise an entrepreneur. She was just living her life and her kid was watching. Your kids are watching too. The question is not whether they are learning from you. They are. The question is what they are learning.
Make sure it is something worth carrying.
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