At What Age Should You Have "the Talk" with Your Kids?

^Source

I was intrigued when I saw a post pop up in the Silver Bloggers community called At What Age Should You Have the Talk with Your Kids? I had a look, thinking the talk was the "death talk" given the community - the talk you need to have with your kids about when you die.

It wasn't, it was a post for parents (grandparents?) about sex education and preventing teenage pregnancies with some pretty horrific statistics from the World Health Organisation and some helpful suggestions about how parents could support their children to prevent unplanned pregnancies while negotiating the tricky landscape of growing up and learning about adult relationships.

But it did start me thinking about "the death talk" and how that can be just as, if not more, challenging than "the talk" for parents to have with their (usually grown up) children. Leaving aside the practical business of bequests, taxes, end of life care, funeral arrangements and how to access your Hive account, there are the emotional aspects of accepting your own mortality and helping your children to accept that, too.

I'm sorry to say that I still don't have a will, although I have designated beneficiaries for my pension funds. The irony is that I don't intend to have anything in my pension funds when I die: my resources will be carefully managed to ensure I have spent every penny or even better, left a perfectly formed small (or even large) debt, preferably with a bank. You're welcome.

I've become really conscious about time over the past year or so, as I've gone through my existential crisis about aging and that the life that I had known for so many years was no longer the case. For fifty-three years, the mantra has been "you need to go to work and earn a living" and then, very abruptly it seemed to me, that was no longer the case. I didn't need to go to work, not to earn a living anyway.

I started earning at thirteen with several part-time jobs, the proverbial paper-round, mainstay of so many teenage finances, a Saturday job, first in the market at Tooting Broadway (lasted two weeks before I was handed a ten-shilling note and told not to come back next week - they were known for that behaviour and I have a sneaking suspicion that I got a job there just to provoke them and get my marching orders) then with F W Woolworths, also in Tooting Broadway (south west London) and also only lasted two weeks.

Eventually, I found a little home in the dry cleaners and laundry on the corner of Glenburnie Road and one of the main thoroughfares, Trinity Road, in Tooting Bec, which had the added advantage of being literally around the corner from where I lived. The laundry was mainly single chaps bringing their office shirts to be laundered and pressed and put in cellophane packets. We booked in their bits and pieces like prescient ghosts of Dot Cotton in 'Stenders, and sent the packages off twice a week, to arrive back in the next delivery, pristine in their protective bags. We sold shirts, too, but not many.

I loved window dressing and would spend hours dusting and re-arranging the display shirts and various cardboard cutouts of smiling young women handing over packets of clean laundry and dry cleaning or notices urging customers to get their items pressed here. Years later, when I was married, my not-very-well husband deposited my entire wardrobe, apart from the clothes I was standing up in, in the same shop for dry cleaning. Apart from wondering what I was going to wear the next day, I was at a loss as to how we were going to pay for all that dry cleaning, never cheap at the best of times.

I've been earning ever since then, progressing from collecting football pools in the icy rain, to grim holiday jobs and part-time bar work and all the other paraphernalia of low-paid, poorly treated, work that you experience when you are young and working class, to proper jobs. At the time, this meant nine to five, Monday to Friday office jobs with a salary requiring a bank account, terms and conditions and bitterly resented pension contributions (at twenty-four, I was never going to get old).

It has varied ever since, ranging from full time employment, to self employment and running several small businesses to a portfolio income of part-time and contract work, and back to a stable job with a salary, shortly to become, as they say, 'consultancy', but as my Anarchist friend says, and no doubt about it, I can, have been able to, put in a shift.

But now I don't have to work for a living, and the biggest realisation was about what that means in terms of time - how much or how little of it is left. All the time you have to work, your focus is on that, getting by, enjoying what you can, putting some aside, in my case driven by not wanting to be cold when I was old. The future is unknown, unobtainable, you never have to think about it because you're not there yet, your life is mapped out: keep bringing the pennies home, and for that reason, you are immortal.

When you get to that time, when you're in that future where, leaving aside global pandemics, climate change and morally bankrupt governments (nothing big, then), your time is your own, you can no longer be immortal. It's brought home to you that your time, your health, is finite. It may be thirty years (my life expectancy), it may be six months, in the lottery of percentages for the major causes of premature death in the UK: stroke, cardio-vascular disease, cancer.

There's lots to think about with that major life-change from immortality (predictive text decided I meant immorality) to mortality. General wisdom is not to make too many major decisions too quickly, like a bereavement, the loss of a partner. Take time to try things out. Good advice, but lurking underneath are the decisions about death, whether it comes sooner or later. How do you prepare and how do you help your loved ones and family to prepare?

^{Saturday Savers Club
I run a savings club every Saturday over on the @eddie-earner account. We're aiming to save £670 ($800) by the end of the year using the 365 day savings challenge. YWe share savings tips and there's a free giveaway every week. There will be a new 365 day savings challenge starting on 1 January 2022.}

^{First Monday - NeedleWorkMonday Community
Every First Monday of the month, I host a Live Chat for an hour from 7pm for the Needlework Monday Community. Bring your knitting, sewing, crochet (or nothing, that's okay, too), a nice cup of something, and join us for a relaxing hour of chat. Find our more in this post}

^{Three things newbies should do in their first week and, for most things, forever afterwards!}