How do kids get pocket money in Sweden? I can't imagine grandparents handing over prepaid debit cards to 8 years old to go buy candy at the neighborhood store?
Swedbank offers debit cards to kids as young as seven [1]. Depending on the kid's age (and what the parents configure), there will be different limits on how much the kid can spend.
Swish is the de facto standard for sending money between individuals [2], and that's what grandparents tend to use to send money to their grandchildren.
It's fee-less (for person-to-person transfers use at least) and it connects your bank account with your phone number. So if anyone wants to send you money, they can just open Swish and enter your phone number (or scan a QR code) and send you some. You also have to sign the payment with the BankID app, which is the de facto standard for authentication [3].
And when I write de facto standard I really mean it. 99.9% of Swedish residents age 18-67 have BankID (8.6M users), while Swish has 8.7M private users (93% of which use Swish at least once per month).
In Canada there's MyDoh, which is specifically a debit card you can give to kids including in that age range. One of the major Canadian banks runs this. Can only imagine that it's more advanced in Sweden.
That may be practical, but many kids I observe in my family etc like to collect the money and see it and are proud of their collection and about what they saved. That goes away with a card ... and I wonder how that impacts the "feeling" for it. Counting and making likes and plans about what to buy is a big part of learning to deal with it.
Like or not the world is a digital currency world for the most part these days. I want my kids to understand that those numbers on a computer screen have real world value. How many young adults get into trouble with their first credit card or debit card because the money isn't "real" to them? In the US it's quite a few.
I don't have a final answer to this. However in m observation with different families and kids is that some start relatively early, before the kid can do arithmetics or such, they can count till a pile got enough money for the sweets or toy they want and then count the other pile to see how much is left and if they can buy the other.
Doing this in a digital system requires first some computing device (be it phone or laptop or whatever) then check the account value, read it correctly, then do some arithmetics and then interpret the result. That's a year or two older.
More or less exactly so. There is another downside to it: When money is just a piece of plastic which you touch the cash register with and get what you want, how to you learn to appreciate money? Coins and paper money is also excellent for counting, as they naturally come in different valuations.
When counting money is just arithmetics and never cash, something is missing, and it's very clear in many young kids. Money is just points in a game, suddenly you're out, and then you can't get what you want anymore.
Where I grew up, (sadly) it's not been common since at least 50 years for 8 year olds to go buy candy at a neighborhood store by themselves. Parents had to drive us everywhere.
