by Scott Pape
Anyway, I remember one time when I had a mate come over after school and stay on for dinner.
‘Your family’s weird,’ he told me at school the next day.
My first thought was that he’d seen the drip pot.
Not so.
Rather, he explained that each night at his home he’d eat his dinner on his lap, by himself, watching the TV.
Our family dinner, by contrast, was ‘weird’.
We ate in the kitchen, at the (laminex) dining table, set with a tablecloth.
The entire family was seated.
The TV was in another room, switched off.
And then, over our meat-and-three-veg, we spoke about what had happened in our day.
We discussed the news, and politics, and the world.
We listened to Dad talk about what was happening in the family business.
We watched Mum and Dad talk about the big purchases they were saving up for.
We got paid pocket money.
And we all pitched in and helped clean up. It was a chain gang: Dad washed the dishes, my sister dried, and I put them away. (Fun fact: to this day my father still washes the dishes by hand, even though he has a dishwasher. He’s suspicious of new technology.)
Up until the point my little mate came over, I never knew dinners could be anything different. It’s kind of like how you pick your footy team—it’s not so much a conscious choice; it’s just how things have always been in your family, and you’d support your dad’s team or else!
Little did I know our dinners were like a form of brainwashing water torture:
Drip. Drip. Drip(ping).
As an adult, I can now look back on things and quite confidently say . . .
I need to check my cholesterol.
Just kidding.
What I can say is that our family dinners were something special, and my parents were employing some serious science (even though they didn’t know it).
A better bet than a $35 000-a-year private school
Decades of university research confirms that my parents were practising the number one habit for raising successful kids:
Regular family dinners.
A comprehensive 16-year-long study by Michigan State University found that the simple act of having regular family dinners was the single biggest predictor of academic achievement.
More than that, the study found that a shared family mealtime was more influential than studying, attending religious services or playing sports.
Too general for you?
The study found that kids who chowed down with their parents were:
•twice as likely to get As at school (yes, mealtimes were more important for this than a fancy private school)
•less likely to take drugs or have a teenage pregnancy
•more resilient, less prone to bullying and less likely to suffer mental health problems as they got older, and more likely to have better self-esteem.
Pretty cool, huh?
Remember the motto of this book:
‘As parents it’s okay if we get most things wrong . . . as long as we get a few big things right.’
Well, having family dinners is one of those ‘big things’ that my parents got right.
So let’s you and I talk about how you can recreate that experience for your family . . . taking a little inspiration from the Japanese.
The honourable mealtime
I heard about this from my mate Matt, who was best man at our wedding.
We’ve been tight for near on 25 years—two country boys who grew up studying (sometimes), working at the local Safeway (a bit), and playing footy (a lot).
Yet Matt’s life took a J-walk in his early twenties when he moved to Tokyo to teach English. He fell in love with, and later married, a Japanese woman. (I was dutifully the MC at their wedding. I do not speak Japanese, and by the end of the night I barely spoke English . . . but that’s a story for another time.)
Fast forward to today: Matt is living in downtown Tokyo and we both have sons roughly the same age. The cool thing about little kids is that they’re basically the same regardless of nationality. Our boys may be half a world away, and growing up in very different cultures, but they like toy trucks, piggyback rides, and inappropriately loud fart noises (the universal language of dads).
But there’s one thing that’s very different about Japan:
Mealtimes.
When I last visited him, Matt explained this strange classroom concept the Japanese call ‘the honourable mealtime’.
The story goes that after the devastation of World War II the Japanese government decided their only hope to repair their shattered country was to make education and healthy food a priority for all Japanese students.
It has worked amazingly well.
To this day very few Japanese kids brown-bag their lunch—instead schools cook nutritious meals, sourced from local ingredients. And the proof is in the tofu—Japan has the lowest obesity levels and one of the highest life expectancies on the planet.
So let’s focus on the honourableness of Japanese school meals.
Here’s their drill:
Each day a bell rings, and the teachers leave the classroom. That’s the cue for students (kids in primary school) to put on their white coats and cute little chef’s hats, grab a ladle, and begin serving up meals for their classmates.
After the kids have eaten—while sitting in the classroom, learning about the benefits of eating healthy vegetables(!)—no teachers or kitchen staff come in and clean up their mess. It’s the students’ ‘honourable duty’ to clean everything away and do the dishes.
‘It’s seen as a sacred ritual in Japan,’ Matt explained.
The dishonourable mealtime
I returned home from Japan like a sharpened chopstick, ready to instigate our very own honourable mealtimes at the Pape household.
It did not go well.
Most nights my wife makes healthy, nutritious meals, sourced from our veggie garden. And, because I know Liz is reading this, I need to say that she’s actually a great cook, and we love her meals. Really, we do.
I came down for dinner, the boys looked unsettled at the table.
‘I don’t like it,’ announced the oldest, sounding like a dead ringer for Pauline the fish ’n’ chip lady.
‘I don’t like it!’ cried my two-year-old.
‘Oh please, you’re just copying your older brother!’ I said, putting on my best dad voice. ‘I’m sure it’s . . . oh . . . it’s apricot chicken . . . again.’
(My wife’s apricot chicken is a motley mix of citrus, chicken . . . and onions? It’s a dish that none of us like, but one that she stoically persists in trying to master.)
At that point Liz threw down her fork and said some very dishonourable things.
And then we all sat in silence.
And then the two-year-old tipped his bowl on his head.
After I’d cleaned up the mess, I went back to my study and did some more reading.
It turns out that Japan has been top of the international student rankings since surveys began.
To find out why, the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) wrote a research report analysing why Japanese students were consistently ahead of their peers.
What they found had a lot of tie-backs to the honourable mealtime mindset:
‘People work very hard in Japan largely to earn the respect and admiration of their colleagues. They do not work hard for personal distinction, but rather for the good of the group . . . there’s a shared belief that if the individual works tirelessly for the group, the group will reciprocate.’
In other words, the culture that Japanese kids grow up in is that everyone pitches in.
Not for money.
Not because they’ll get lollies later.
They work hard for each other because they’re part of a group and it’s the honourable thing to do.
And that’s the key for your kids. They should be expected to
pitch in and help out with dinner for free . . . with their only payoff being that they’re fed.
So let’s take everything we’ve covered here . . . and put it all together.
Tying it all together: the Barefoot Money Meal
One of the cornerstones of this book—in fact, one of the ‘big things’ to get right—is having a regular meal together:
I call it the Barefoot Money Meal.
The Barefoot Money Meal brings together the best of everything we’ve discussed so far:
•It offers your kids the benefits of sitting down to a regular meal together, better academic performance, higher self-confidence and improved resilience.
•It follows the time-tested principles of the Japanese honourable mealtime to instil a lifelong work ethic in your kids.
•It serves as the ‘anchor’ for your new ‘three jam jars, three jobs, three minutes’ pocket money system—to supply the missing link between hard work, earning and giving/saving/spending.
•And let’s be honest, you were already going to eat dinner anyway, right?
Yet as you’re reading this you may be thinking: ‘Calm down, Barefoot—you haven’t met my Marilyn Manson-inspired son. Unless I dish him up a doobie at dinner . . . this is going to be a bloodbath.’
Uh-huh.
I fully appreciate we’re not in Kansas anymore, Marilyn.
That’s why the Barefoot Money Meals are not only super simple and lots of fun . . . but your kids will even beg you to do them.
Why?
Because it’s PAYDAY!
Yet I’m well aware that if this is too hard then you’re not going to do it at all, let alone long term (which is where the real power lies).
That’s why a Barefoot Money Meal is made up of three super-simple rules that anyone can follow, anywhere, any time—no matter your income, education, financial knowledge, number of kids, or whatever else.
The three rules of Money Meal
The first rule of Money Meal is that you don’t talk about Money Meal.
Sorry, that’s Fight Club.
(Though at my house there’s often a fair amount of fighting, over dinner.)
Here are the real rules for making Money Meal the best night of your week:
1. Everyone pitches in
If your house is anything like mine, dinner is like feeding time at the zoo: it’s something you rarely look forward to, it’s over quickly and you’re left with the mess.
But if your kids want to eat, they have to pitch in—peeling the potatoes, setting the table, clearing the table, stacking the dishwasher, wiping down the benches.
I call them duties (which is very different from paid jobs).
Everyone has a ‘Dinner Duty’ to do as part of putting dinner on the table, not just the parents. Not for money. It’s the honourable thing to do.
2. It’s payday!
A weekly Barefoot Money Meal provides the perfect anchor for your three-minute check of the Barefoot Scoreboard, and for paying your kids their weekly pocket money.
For maximum effect I recommend leaving payday to the end of the meal, to keep your kids interested.
(Quick note: This rule works like a charm in my house, but you may prefer to keep your three-minute weekly payday separate from mealtime. Up to you!)
3. Make it your new family tradition
Throughout this book, as we go through the Barefoot Ten (in Part II), I’ll be taking you through some extra-special Money Meals I’ve designed for each step—which are carefully engineered to imprint a specific lesson about money on your kids’ minds.
Yet the real power in Barefoot Money Meals is not just doing ten of them here and there . . . but in doing them week in, week out, and regularly sharing a meal where the whole family pitches in and gets paid for the week’s work.
Here’s a pro tip: to build the habit, choose the same night each week. In our family, it’s Sunday, but whatever works for you.
The Family Legends game
Every family has their own legends.
Dad was once a gun footy player. Mum was once a world-famous yodeller, tragically cut short in her prime. Grandpa invested his life savings in Apple in the eighties, but sold them out to buy . . . oranges?
A 2001 study by American psychologists Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush found that asking kids simple ‘Do You Know?’ questions about their family history gives them control over their lives—by giving them a powerful sense they are part of something bigger than themselves.
In other words, it gives them their family backstory.
Questions like:
•Do you know what went on when you were being born?
•Do you know where your mother/father grew up?
•Do you know some of the jobs your parents had when they were young?
Almost every Barefoot Money Meal in this book has some questions like this for your kids.
I call it the Family Legends game.
There’s method to the madness: you’re going to create your own Family Legends—the good times, the hard times, and, most importantly of all, how you bounced back when things went bad. What’s more, the families that have gone through this book tell me that Family Legends is one of the most powerful and enjoyable parts of the Barefoot Money Meals.
And before we get to your first Money Meal, I’ve got one last little tip for you—and we have Steve Jobs to thank for it.
Put down your bloody phone
Steve Jobs was one of the greatest entrepreneurs who ever lived.
We all remember Steve the Visionary—standing on stage, unveiling yet another shiny gadget that would cause geeks to camp out on the street to be the very first person to shell out $800.
Yet what you may not know is that Steve the Dad was a very different dude.
For example, when a journalist from the New York Times asked Jobs how his kids liked the iPad, he replied:
‘They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.’
Right-y-o.
That’s a bit like finding out that Willy Wonka didn’t let the Oompa Loompas eat chocolate!
Meanwhile, in most Aussie homes, we’re glued to our screens. A 2015 study (by Telstra) showed 40 per cent of adults admit to taking their phones to the loo. Seriously, how good is Steve Jobs’ marketing machine?
Yet not only did Steve put down his phone around his kids—he also employed what we now agree is the ‘killer app’ of parenting.
In his biography of Steve Jobs, author Walter Isaacson observed dinner times at the Jobs household:
‘Every evening Steve made a point of having dinner at the big long table in their kitchen, discussing books and history and a variety of things. No one ever pulled out an iPad or a computer. The kids did not seem addicted at all to devices.’
The only thing that Steve connected with over his dinner was . . . his kids!
See, for all the amazing tech innovations that help us do more, the ultimate killer app is still within us.
Thankfully, my parents didn’t have a choice . . . and my childhood ‘Money Meals’ involved more time tasting food than Instagramming about it.
And similarly, each weekly Money Meal at our house is a no-screens zone.
And while it’s obviously your choice, that’s what I advise you do for your Money Meals too.
Think of it this way: every moment your kid is on a screen, chances are they’re being influenced by someone who doesn’t care about them nearly as much as you do. By their friends. By social media. By marketers. By an algorithm.
Dinner time is your time. So let’s get into it . . .
Welcome to your first Barefoot Money Meal!
Words can’t express how excited I am for you right now.
People just like you have sat where you are, reading through these pages, getting things in place.
They’ve taken this plan and not only fundamentally changed their children’s futures, but also created a new tradition that has brought them closer as a family.
For all the mundane ‘where’s your backpack, put your shoes on, we’re running late’ that is parenting, you’re going to create moments, share real-world experiences and have conversations with your kids that you’ll remember for the rest of your life. And so will they.
Money Meal ‘shopping list’
Here’s what you’ll need to get ready for your first Money Meal:
•three jam jars for each child (all ages)
•sparkly pens so your kids can decorate
•printed Barefoot Scoreboard for each kid (barefootinvestor.com/resources)
•wallet or purse for older kids.
YOUR FIRST BAREFOOT MONEY MEAL
ENTRÉE:
Call your kids for dinner. When you’re all seated, announce: ‘Every Sunday (or whatever day you pick) we’re going to have a special meal—called a Money Meal—because it’s PAYDAY!’
(Feel free to sing those words like Oprah: ‘Free car!’)
To break the ice, ask your kids some conversation starters—just adapt the following questions to suit your family. Throughout the book I tend to refer to ‘Mum and Dad’ but please take that to mean any caregivers.
Play the Family Legends game:
Do you know . . .
•where Mum and Dad met . . . and who made the first move?
•what happened when you were born?
•how Mum and Dad chose your name?
Seriously, do this game—your kids will love it.
MAIN COURSE:
Lay out the jam jars and the Scoreboard.
Explain the Money Meal idea: it happens each week, everyone pitches in, everyone gets paid pocket money for doing jobs during the week.
The pocket money will go into the jam jars, some money into every jar.
On their Scoreboard, each kid writes three jobs (see pages) and their savings goal, then sticks it on the fridge.
Answer any questions the kids may have (see the Parents’ Script below).