A Financial InterGroup Holdings Ltd development project
The Child Financial Literacy Program
We have created a branded financial literacy program for children and their parents with extensions of the brand to online banking services, web portals and financial products. The program is unique in its outreach to parents of young children. This market has never been served with the financial literacy material appropriate to children's cognitive abilities, nor has such a program been delivered in as efficient a manner. Starting with picture books meant to be read by parents to pre-school age children, utilizing multiple child focused venues, and progressing to relationships with banks and schools, our program minimizes direct bank staff involvement while being the least disruptive to school schedules and teaching resources.
We adapt higher level financial concepts to children through simplifying techniques such as relating real world experiences, visual cues, touch points of the automated components of the financial system found in everyday interactions, etc. Most importantly, we have created an extremely efficient delivery system, consisting of age appropriate financial products and services, and additional educational and information resources, as this parent and child market matures in their life cycle relationship with banks and other financial institutions.
The program further aims to establish: a child financial literacy institute; an academic journal for financial literacy; promoting a national campaign of child financial literacy; and organizing electronic linkages and web services for financial institutions, students and schools to foster financial literacy in the pre-K - 12 market.
The implementation of this plan has been vetted through a two year controlled research project for children pre-K-4. The research tested approaches to teaching about money and savings by embracing the modern ways of finance and its implications to our society's big issues of retirement and social security, taxes, health care, entitlement programs, et al. The successful piloting of the first book in the series Where the Money Grows© and conversations with thought leaders in the pre-K – 12 school system led us to conclude that we could fill a gap in early childhood financial literacy education.
Emma Worth's Money Mystery Book Series
Whether young or old, wealthy or not so, from whatever part of our culturally mixed society,
living our modern day lives demands that we interact with an ever more complex and seemingly
unfathomable financial system. Do we really understand it? How can we help our children
understand it? More importantly, how are we to instill the lifelong habits that lead to long-
term wealth creation, and how will we prepare our children for financing their own retirement?
Where are the disciplines of a lifetime of saving and investing to come from? Where is the
understanding of the financial implications of modern day social issues to be learned? Lifelong
habits such as saving and knowledgeable citizenship are formed in early childhood. Shouldn't
we be teaching our children the basics of finance as early as possible? That is what this series of children's books is all about.
The Authors:
Allan and Deborah Grody live in New York City and are practicing what they preach in the
indoctrination of their granddaughter into all matters of physical and information based money -
getting it, using it and abusing it.
Mr. Grody has been involved in the financial industry for nearly five decades as a corporate business executive, consultant, entrepreneur and academic. He has been translating complex financial matters into simple to understand concepts all throughout his career. He is the President of the Financial InterGroup companies, the developers of this program.
Dr. Deborah Grody is in private practice as a clinical psychologist in New York City. Early in her three-decade career she was a school psychologist and worked with learning disabled children.
Wendy Wax is a noted child author and illustrator with over 40 books published.