Money Games for Kids

A galaxy of new web tools and games have popped up that are designed to teach children about "financial literacy"—the buzzword for the stuff you are supposed to know to stay out of debt and save enough for retirement.

Few schools formally teach skills such as budgeting, balancing your checkbook or the difference between a stock or a bond, so families, of course, are left to fill the void.

Unfortunately, most don't. Since the nonprofit JumpStart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy started surveying high-school students in 1997, they have consistently flunked.

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I recently tried out a few online games and calculators with my son, and I was embarrassed to realize how few money concepts my husband and I have exposed our second-grader to so far.

Although he can build complicated Lego models in a few hours, it turns out my son doesn't know the first thing about the trade-offs between saving in a low-interest bank account versus a potentially higher-paying, but riskier, stock. This, despite the fact that we dutifully trotted him to a community bank at age three to open a savings account and gave him a framed share of stock for his seventh birthday.

Timothy Knotts, a certified financial planner in Red Bank, N.J., has four children, ages 22 to 17, and says he has learned the hard way that "the thing we need to focus more on with children as teenagers is this whole concept of overspending."

His oldest son was overwhelmed with credit-card offers in college and wound up with $600 in debt, Mr. Knotts says. "For a kid who doesn't have a source of income, it's a nightmare."

The father chose to use the experience as a "teachable moment." He paid off his son's debt and together they set up a summer-job repayment schedule.

The good news is that many of the same tools that can help parents identify the gaps in their children's understanding of basic financial concepts also can help fill them, relatively painlessly and at little or no cost. Be careful, though, whenever a game is backed by a financial-services firm. In theory, there could be a conflict of interest.

Here are some of the latest offerings.

At Visa's financial-literacy website, a number of games target different ages (practicalmoneyskills.com/games). Peter Pig's Money Counter is a fun way for 4- to 7-year-olds to become more facile with change. In Money Metropolis (aimed at children ages 7 to 12), players make choices about how to spend and earn money.

These games seemed best suited for desktop computers that use a regular mouse. My son can't go that fast yet with the built-in mouse on my laptop, but he liked playing them anyway. For older kids, there is Financial Football, which sports cool NFL graphics.

The Great Piggy Bank Adventure (piggybank.disney.go.com) is a virtual board game with lots of sophisticated graphics and animation on Disney's website, backed by T. Rowe Price Group . My son and a colleague's 9-year-old son tried this one out. In both cases, the moms had a hard time getting the game up and running. But once we did, the boys loved it.

The 9-year-old chose to play for an hour, proclaiming it, "The best computer game I have ever played." He was required to set financial goals, such as saving for a basketball hoop (level 1), a vacation (level 2) and a sailboat (level 3). Players are frequently tempted to buy smaller items that would set them back. He quickly learned not to spend along the way, his mom says.

There also is an "inflation wolf" that steals money from your piggy bank. The game poses questions, too, such as: What is an example of wasteful spending at a burger joint? Answer: Buying nachos that you don't eat.

A number of other games target a specific skill, such as budgeting. The Be Your Own Boss Challenge at themint.org, for example, points out characteristics that entrepreneurs need, and a true-false quiz underscores that many millionaires live modestly.

Other sites are more nuts-and-bolts. An allowance-management tool—allowancemanager.com—offers a spreadsheet to track a child's money, along with chore charts. Another one, hellowallet.com, offers a free one-month trial, and then charges $8.95 a month for individualized financial guidance that uses behavioral research to try to help users build their savings. Lucy Snyder, a high-school senior in Brooklyn, N.Y., checked out HelloWallet and found it "more appropriate for older teenagers who are already familiar with some [personal-finance] concepts."

Parents who want to teach their children about philanthropy, along with short-term and long-term savings goals, might like kidworth.com. The site lets parents and children set goals in those three categories and then send out "ecards" to grandparents or other family and friends asking for donations or a specific gift or investment.

So what self-respecting 7-year-old would prefer to ask for money for charity or college rather than Legos? Mine, it turns out. This site led to a great conversation about "needs" and "wants," the cost of piano lessons, our tiny church's goal of raising $1 million to repair its sanctuary ceiling and the cost of college.

Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts can earn badges for learning to manage their finances. High schools are starting to offer financial-literacy programs at night, sometimes led by financial planners. And a few states are starting to develop a financial-planning curriculum for schools, Mr. Knotts, the financial planner, says.

Henry Montag, a father of five and a certified financial planner in Uniondale, N.Y., leads sessions aimed at teens and their parents or grandparents. Among the concepts he covers: distinguishing between wants and needs; sticking to a budget; building good credit; and basic saving and investment strategies.

He has found that it is as important to reach parents as their children. "Because we want to make our children's lives better," he says, "we wind up inadvertently doing things that make our kids dependent on us."

—Anne Tergesen contributed to this article.—Email: familyvalue@wsj.com