Children form money habits by age seven, expert warns

Children have formed their money habits by the age of seven, GoHenry founder Louise Hill has warned, arguing that leaving financial skills until later in life “makes no sense at all”.

Speaking at the Growth & Exit Summit 2026, hosted by Champions (UK) plc at Squire Patton Boggs in London on 7 October, Hill said the window for shaping children’s attitudes to money closes far earlier than most parents realise.

“We know that kids form money habits by the age of seven,” she said. “They don’t start to form them. They’ve already formed them so leaving money skills to luck or at some point later in life makes no sense at all.”

Hill, whose children’s money app joined Barclays Bank UK on 1 October, compared financial education to learning to swim.

“You could learn all the theory in the world about swimming, but until the day you get in the water, you are never going to learn to swim. Well, I think money skills are the same,” she said. “You have to have access to money and you have to be able to make those mistakes, small sheltered mistakes with money if you’re really going to learn.”

GoHenry’s research shows 84 per cent of children and teenagers want financial education in school, while 68 per cent are worried about leaving school with no money skills.

That data underpinned a six year campaign by the company to make money lessons compulsory. Last November the government announced that financial education will become a mandatory part of the citizenship curriculum in schools in England from September 2028.

GoHenry shared 15 years of anonymised data with the Treasury and worked with the University of Manchester and the University of St Andrews. Hill said children taught about money are 46 per cent more likely to start a business which, if extrapolated, would mean 125,000 new UK jobs a year and £7 billion a year for the economy. Those taught about investing as children will have £320,000 more in savings and investments by the age of 60.

“Our data showed without question that if you teach kids about money, when they are young, it changes their behaviours for life,” she said.

Hill said she had fought to stop the subject going only into maths, which she described as “theory not practice”. She added she was “really excited about what that means for the next generation of kids growing up in the UK”.

GoHenry, launched in 2012 for six to 18 year olds, serves more than 500,000 children in the UK and has helped more than two million young people.