Go Henry, No Henry
By Albert B. Kelly
I can be a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to certain things we consider progress. That’s especially true when it comes to children and the ways we tend to rob children of “childhood”. One example of my angst involves children and smartphones. I don’t know the perfect age for a young person to have a smartphone, but I refuse to believe that much good can come out of 9 or 10 year-olds having iPhones.
At first glance, what could possibly be wrong with gohenry? It helps kids learn how to handle money and budget and understand all sorts of financial literacy-type things that even some of us adults struggle to comprehend. That’s gohenry’s pitch, as it says on its website “making every kid good with money”.
The goal of financial literacy is a worthy one, but I’m not so sure that this isn’t just another way for a credit card company to groom and prime the next generation of potential customers who will soon transition to credit cards, no doubt theirs, racking up debt at an even younger ages. I’m all for brand loyalty, but not when it comes to creating appetites for consumer debt in kids.
We already live in a society that is marked not so much for what it manufactures since we now outsource most everything and not even as a service-oriented economy since everything from transportation (think Uber) and lodging (think Airbnb) to retail (think Amazon) is now a digital platform, but as a society that mostly just buys and consumes stuff and we go into to debt to do it.
If that’s not enough, we’re now consumers who want same-day delivery. So it’s not enough to buy things; we don’t want to wait for whatever we buy- we want it almost as soon as we empty our digital shopping carts. If you think that’s accidental or simply a byproduct of the digital age, you would be wrong.
Those who sell us things don’t want us to think about our purchases or the ramifications, i.e., whether we can afford it or need it, they groom us to buy on impulse. It took time to make us impulsive consumers and it was done in the name of comfort and convenience. So it is with “gohenry”, it’s about convenience as you plunk down your child’s allowance on his or her debit card that they’ll use to buy goodness-knows-what with virtually no parental oversight.
And I can only imagine the amount of backdoor data the company will amass on a family’s spending habits and finances and how that data will be leveraged and manipulated to maximize profits. At the same time, children are being conditioned to be impulse consumers, apart from their parents, as they hand over their data and debit cards with all the long term consequences that come with such transactions.
My guess is that a good many of today’s parents struggle with setting boundaries for their children and when necessary, telling them “no”. I can imagine the pressure from some children toward a parent to add more money to their card and the pressure parents will feel to comply- the going price to be liked.
gohenry allows parents to “add money to your parent account by debit card” as well as “set up regular allowance transfers” or better yet, “make one-off transfers and help your child earn extra by completing tasks”. The negotiations that will now attach to finishing one’s homework, cleaning one’s room, or eating one’s green beans might reach a whole new level of ugly.
I’m all for teaching financial literacy to children, but this has the same feel as the video games that encourage kids to spend huge sums on “in-game” perks using their parent’s credit cards- it’s a backdoor way to separate people from their money through their children and imbed into a family’s finances. There are already too many ways that society takes innocence and simplicity out of childhood, a debit card should not be one of them.