Welcome to Paper Robots, Stephen Day's site about teaching kids about money and work

An origin story, and what paper robots have to do with family economics

When I was in kindergarten, my teacher assigned an activity: make robots out of paper. The lesson was so much of a success with my friend Ben and me that we spent the next few weeks in class trying to make paper robots every minute of the day. We made dozens of them. We even made ones that could be folded into vehicles, just like Transformer toys. We used brass fasteners to make rotating limbs, and rubber bands to give them catapults that could launch missiles across the classroom.

I don’t think we learned anything else in class, and worse, we started to drain the room’s art supplies. Our teacher, Mrs. Segrist (who was wonderful), eventually intervened, and sequestered robot-manufacturing to special times of the day, and in limited quantities. So we moved our enterprise home.

One fateful day, I left Ben’s house to go home for dinner. He had the brass fasteners that I needed to make movable joints for the robots I’d be making that evening, so I took some home, without asking. I hadn’t been home half an hour when his mom drove up to our house with Ben in the back seat, screaming bloody murder out the car window. His mom explained that Ben needed every single fastener for the robots he was planning to make, and that he felt I had deliberately sabotaged him. “Butthead!” he thundered out the car window as they pulled away, bearing all the precious fasteners with him. After that incident, our robot production declined. Five-year-olds can be really protective of their property. For my part, I wrote small books about the robots, which I gave as Christmas presents to my grandparents.

Forty years later, the tradition has continued. My nine-year-old son has become a master of making paper products, including paper orcs, Vikings, castles, and cardboard-and-duct-tape weapons. He’s even started selling them at school as an extension of our household mini-economy (did I mention we have a mini-economy at home?). If kids have the opportunity to actually sell their creations, you get to see a while new level of creativity, drive, and flair in them.

The paper robots illustrate several things about how small children make choices and manage resources.

• Kids should have constant opportunities to create things inside and outside of school.

• Kids should have to manage scarce resources. They can’t simply plunder the art supply box at school, or take each other’s things.

• Kids need opportunities to share their work entrepreneurially. Some of the best ways are by starting a mini-business, or writing a book about the things they make. School-based projects, shows, and competitions are great, but you really get to see the kids light up if they get so sell their work.

• Creativity is best when it’s in community. We learn new skills from others, like how Mrs. Segrist taught us how to make the robots in the first place. We also create things with others, buy and sell in a market, and have personal relationships with the people with whom we create. This can strain relationships, or build them up.

I’ll be writing about these sorts of things on this site. I’ll discuss how to set up a mini-economy at home, how to have money conversations with kids, how to think about your own grown-up finances, how to use the power of community to shore up your finances and build creativity, and what makes a good education.

This is why I call Paper Robots a site about family economics. Economics is about how we make choices when we find that we can’t reach all our goals with the resources that we have. Families need to think about their choices, values, and goals together. Paper Robots will bring insights from economics, psychology, education, and real world experience to help families start these conversations. That way we can build stability, creativity, and community as we grow together. Thanks for coming on this journey with me!