The Influence of Parental Financial Socialisation Techniques on Student Financial Behavior

This study investigated which financial socialisation techniques parents used to influence students’ financial behaviour. Few students possess satisfactory levels of knowledge regarding financial concepts and, as a result, often struggle with high debt levels. Although parents can play an important role in developing and shaping the financial behaviour of students, they often fail to teach students about money management. Studies find that for students to demonstrate responsible financial behaviour, their financial socialisation by their parents should improve. The literature review identified seven financial socialisation techniques parents use to socialise students about financial concepts. These include financial secrecy, financial conflict, financial teaching, modelling of financial behaviour, monitoring of financial behaviour, reinforcement of financial behaviour and parental relationships. The study followed a quantitative research design to gather the responses of 350 South African students by means of a self-administered, structured questionnaire. Only six financial socialisation techniques were extracted from the exploratory factor analysis. Hypotheses were re-formulated to test the relationships between the financial socialisation techniques of parents and the financial behaviour of students. The empirical results revealed that three financial socialisation techniques used by parents, namely, financial teaching and monitoring, modelling of financial behaviour and reinforcement of financial behaviour significantly influence the financial behaviour of students. Therefore, parents should increase financial teaching and monitoring, the modelling of financial behaviour as well as the reinforcement of financial behaviour to improve the financial behaviour of students. These results have implications for parents and financial educators, and the implementation of this study’s recommendations could ultimately improve the financial behaviour of South African students.