Talking to children about money and mental health
Mental Health Awareness Week (11-17 May) is a chance to open up important conversations with children about how they're feeling. One area that's often overlooked? Money.
In this piece, Emma Mahon from our Financial Education Delivery Team shares how helping children understand money is an important part of nurturing sense of self and mental health.
As educators, I think we can say that working in a classroom is a bit like trying to solve an ever changing algorithm. Mark work, set homework, respond to emails, review what went right, what went wrong, working walls that need changing, DT day supplies that need ordering and on and on it goes. But if we cut back all the chaff, quieten down all the noise, turn off all the reminders, we can see what the magic of this profession is at its core.
We build pupils up.
Engineering the classroom so our pupils leave primary school with a strong sense of self, a confidence in knowing their boundaries and a sense of belonging is key to them nurturing and maintaining good mental health. Pupils leaving the classroom at the end of Year Six believing in their capabilities and right to exist happily, is a job well done and I believe the essence of what education should be.
Allowing pupils to understand the world, question it, improve it, celebrate it, even get angry at it, is such a key part to unpicking the complexities of their own mental health. No wonder we need a cup of tea and quiet, dark room at the end of each school day (or was that just me?!). As we turn our eye to Mental Health Awareness Week 2026, it’s daunting to think that we educators have such an impact on someone who will soon become an adult. Holding down a job, perhaps with a family of their own, just trying to get through the day is unpredictable for a myriad of reasons. But if we address one of the key factors of life – Money - well, this adds a whole other layer of uncertainty and mystery. And too often, young people are thrown into it as adults with no preparation.
why talking about money and emotions matters in primary classrooms
Mental health and money are deeply interconnected. We know that, too often, financial stress has a negative impact on mental health. Our schools see this when they speak to parents, when foodbanks are opened up on site, and when pupils share their worries. Talking about money and emotions in primary classrooms matters because financial behaviours are not shaped on their own. Mental health, family circumstances, and wider social pressures can all influence how children begin to understand and respond to money from an early age. Pressure on young people to always make the “right” financial choice overlooks these important factors.
Creating space to explore money alongside emotions can support children to develop a more balanced and compassionate understanding of financial behaviour - in themselves and in other people as well. This can help to build confidence, reduce stigma, and recognise that managing money is not just a practical skill but one closely connected to wellbeing and lived experience.
The theme for this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week is ‘Action’ and what better way to take action than ensuring pupils have regular opportunity to practice talking about money choices safely and openly.
We know money is complex and at times can be dominated by negative feelings like guilt, shame, fear or stress. When we talk about money, we don’t pretend that these don’t exist or that difficulties with money won’t arise. But by removing some of the mystery around financial choices, we are able to support our pupils to feel more confident, curious, proud and ambitious about their future aspirations. At the heart of it, we want children to understand their emotions around finances so they can spot patterns in behaviours which can affect their mental wellbeing. Our resource ‘Five Big Questions’ specifically focusses one of its questions on the ever important, ‘How does money make us feel?’
Letting children rehearse real life scenarios in our Money Adventure Game helps them build that confidence and financial knowledge which is so sorely needed to maintain good mental health. Opening up the discussion surrounding mysterious topics like ‘debt’, ‘interest’, and ‘taxes’ in our Conversation Cards again removes the question marks above those words and reinstates the chant that all primary schools instill in their pupils: ‘Worried about it? Don’t know what that means? Talk to a trusted adult. Get the right information from a trusted source’. A message we hope they take into many different scenarios, but especially any concerning finances. At Just Finance Foundation we find it a huge privilege to support educators in their ambition to equip pupils with knowledge and skills needed for a happy life.
Teachers check out the rest of our resources on our website, including our fully rebooted Five Big Questions and access more free teaching guidance and resources.
Emma Mahon
Financial Education Delivery Coordinator at the Just Finance Foundation, Emma supports schools across the UK to deliver LifeSavers by facilitating training, producing classroom resources and providing ongoing support. A former primary teacher with over a decade’s experience, she draws on her work as a PSHE and Maths coordinator to inform classroom practice and the LifeSavers programme.