Can a toy help kids aged four to eight eet smart with money:

In an increasingly cashless society, parents are having to move on from the traditional piggy bank and are turning to pocket money services such as GoHenry cards. These come with apps for children and parents that allow you to set spending limits and monitor spending as well as set up saving pots.

The question parents are left asking is, 'What age should I start my child learning about money?' And often, a parent simply feels that age eight is a little too young for them to have a bank card.

In the era of the piggy bank, it was simpler to teach youngsters about money because they loved to collect pennies, store it up in their bedroom and jangle it away in their pockets on the way to the shops. Even if they couldn't quite understand what it all meant they felt they had their own treasure.

Writing in The Guardian in 2022, Rupert Jones reported that a cashless society was coming a step closer in the UK, as more than 23 million people had used virtually no coins in the previous year. That makes it hard for children to relate to the coins they're storing up, since they hardly ever witness their parents or other adults using them.

Matt Hyde, product director at Nestlums, said, "Young children learn through observation and imitation. Kids as young as four years old see their parents and other adults mysteriously tap a card when they get on a bus or when they pay in a shop. One tap seems to buy almost anything in a young child's mind.

We forget that from a youngster's perspective there are no numbers involved with what they see. They just see a card as a powerful object, whereas in the cash world, they would have at least seen coins and notes being handed representing a larger or smaller number, to help them understand how big or small the value of the transaction was that had just taken place." One option in the cashless world is to maybe wait until a bank card feels right. This is down to a parent to decide. Is it OK to delay until eight or nine years old? Possibly not.