Center on Assets, Education, and Inclusion

This article focuses on unifying, seemingly at times, disparate aspects of school-related Child Development Account (CDA) programs in order to maximize their effects. Account ownership and financial education are the two key components of school-related CDA programs. Despite this most of the focus by asset theorists and researchers has been on the account ownership side of CDAs. To unify these two components we use identity-based motivation (IBM) theory. Further, we suggest that early experience with money failures and lack of positive role models results in many lower income and minority children entering CDA programs with low financial efficacy. Because of low financial efficacy, we suggest that in order for financial education programs to be successful among lower income and minority children they need to be designed to address this reality. We posit that a way to address the reality of lower income and minority students is to adopt solution-focus brief therapy (SFBT) techniques. These techniques can be used to teach financial education instructors how to build positive financial efficacy beliefs among lower income and minority children.