How To Talk To Kids About Insurance When They’re In Elementary School? Img ©
Is there a right way to talk to kids about insurance? I have kids in elementary school, and sometimes they ask questions where “our Oakland Renters Insurance would take care of it for us” is the right answer, but that leads to other questions, and I’m not quite sure how to deal with those!
Talk To Kids About Insurance In Elementary School
Kids get concerned about things that might not even cross your mind. They’ll hear part of an adult conversation and wonder “what it?” and their minds run with it and concoct all sorts of terrifying scenarios that cause unnecessary fear. Since insurance is designed for “what if?” situations, it’s a good idea to talk to kids about insurance in elementary school proactively.
This doesn’t have to be an in-depth conversation, of course. Depending on their exact age, a discussion of what it covers and where the money comes from is probably appropriate. There are good ways to handle this that can avoid creating more worries about the very scenarios in their heads you’re trying to prevent.
If you talk to kids about insurance in elementary school, you begin to form good habits in them. They’ll understand that insurance is a part of everyone’s life, in an age-appropriate way, and they won’t be surprised or indignant when they need insurance of their own later in life. Just like anything else, the more you expose your child early on to the basics of things that they’ll need later on, the better off they’ll be when that time eventually comes.
In elementary school, they’re at a place where they’re likely to listen to you and even internalize things that you say to them. If you wait until they’re teenagers, well, that might not be the case. All the better reason to lay the groundwork now.
Talk To Kids About Insurance And What It Covers In Elementary School
When you talk to kids about insurance in elementary school, what it covers can be pretty general. Kids know that bad things happen to people, and usually to people who didn’t do anything to deserve it. Kids also know that when they do something wrong to someone else, they have to make it right. Those two truisms form the basis of talking to kids about insurance and what it covers.
Building on “bad things happen to good people,” chances are that they’ve seen the news a few times by now, whether on TV, online, or in a paper. They know that sometimes fires happen for no reason, and not because anyone did anything to start it. They know that fires happen to people who have families.
When those fires happen, insurance is there to help those people out. It makes sure they have a place to go while repairs are being made. It makes sure that they’re able to replace the stuff they had, so that they don’t have to do without. If wind or snow hurt their house, insurance can help fix it. If someone steals from them, insurance can help them replace what was stolen, too.
Those are broad, general concepts that kids are already aware of, which makes them a good entry into talking to kids about insurance.
Kids also know that if they hurt someone, they need to make it right. At their age, that might consist of saying they’re sorry, but they know that something needs to be done to make the person who was hurt whole again. They know that, even if it was an accident, they’re still responsible for the consequences, at least on some level.
Insurance is a way to be responsible when an accident happens and you hurt someone. If you’re playing baseball and you hit someone with the ball accidentally, you didn’t mean for it to happen. But that person is still hurt. It might cost them money to see a doctor, and they might not be able to go to school for a few days. Those things all have to be made right, and insurance is a way to do that. Insurance can help them to go to the doctor and make sure they have the help they need if they miss a few days of school.
The idea is to make sure they understand that accidents happen, and that insurance is there to take care of those accidents. Along with that, it’s a great time to talk to kids about how things they do on purpose that hurt other people are not covered by insurance, and how that’s a bad thing for them because insurance is designed to fix things. If insurance can’t fix something they did on purpose, they’ll have to fix it themselves.
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Talk To Kids About Insurance And Where The Money Comes From In Elementary School
What happens when Oakland Renters Insurance pays for something and fixes the bad thing that happened to a person? Where does that money really come from? You don’t have to go into great detail with this when you talk to kids about insurance. It’s probably enough to say that lots of people with insurance put their money together.
If twenty people all put in five dollars each, and a fifty dollar bad thing happens to one of them, the insurance company then has the money to pay for that fifty dollar bad thing. It’s on a rather larger scale than that, of course, but that’s a good example. Older elementary school age children can be told that the insurance company hires people whose job it is to make sure that the bad things they’re paying for really happened, to protect everyone from other people who would want to take something they’re not entitled to.
You can also talk to kids about insurance in terms of the monthly cost. Again, depending on age, you might want to frame it differently. For younger kids, the fact that you pay for it is enough. It might also be appropriate to frame it as a percentage of the household budget rather than a total dollar amount, especially if you don’t talk to your kids about amounts of money often.
Talking to kids about insurance doesn’t have to be scary or difficult. There are much worse conversations with your kids to fear.
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Shauna Hawkins
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