For us as parents, the birth of a child is a joyful time. Friends and family come together to celebrate the miracle of a new person joining the human race. Everyone expresses their hope and good wishes for the future. But there’s another group of people with a different interest in your child, and they don’t show up at the labour ward. To them, your child is a customer.

By the age of two most children can already recognise several well-known commercial logos. By five they are likely to have been exposed to their first half million marketing messages. Before their early teens they will have clear ideas about which food brands they want to eat, which clothes brands they want to wear, which mobile phone is cool. They’ll let you know, too. It’s not called pester power for nothing.

At the same time, children observe debt all around them – the legacy of a generation of easy credit which has seen regular saving among adults plunge to an all-time low. The modern trend is to have everything now, rather than wait until we can afford it, and for our youngsters the temptation to spend what they don’t have is enormous. One high street store recently ran a marketing campaign that said: ‘Want it? Gotta have it!’ Their target market? Pre-teen girls. Sadly, this shop is not the only one that should be banished to the naughty step.

On top of that comes the desire to accumulate ‘stuff’, and keep up appearances. Almost every modern child’s bedroom contains a pile of objects which they don’t really need, or even want. Just under half of 16 to 24 year-olds (44 per cent) say their friends put pressure on them to keep buying, even when they have run out of money. This mixture of sophisticated marketing, peer pressure and a ‘gotta have it’ culture is a ferocious cocktail, and few are entirely immune to its effects.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that many children are growing up with unrealistic ideas about money. They could almost be forgiven for thinking it comes from winning the lottery, from five minutes of fame on reality TV, from Premiership football – even from the Government. Never mind that lottery wins are a 14 million to one chance, or that for every successful footballer thousands fail.

As a result, personal debt in the UK is increasing at the rate of a million pounds every five minutes. Every four minutes someone is declared insolvent or bankrupt. More than half of England’s teenagers owe (or have owed) money by the time they are 17. And the Consumer Credit Counselling Service reports that more and more young people are contacting them for help with debt.

Of course, most young people don’t go too badly off track. But the world around them certainly sets a poor example of how to manage money. It’s never been more important for children to understand that money is earned, to learn to live within their means, to spend wisely, to resist the marketing hype. These are not options – they are vital life skills. If your child can acquire them early on, he or she will have an advantage as significant as a college or university education.

But how to do it? Bringing up kids to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ is one thing; instilling financial savvy is something else entirely. One thing’s certain: without a specific plan, you’re leaving things to chance – or at least unconsciously passing on your own attitudes. That’s fine as long one or both of you happens to be a financial whizz. (Sadly, it works the other way too: research shows that parents with serious debt problems tend to transmit that lack of financial awareness to their children.) Most of us fall between those two extremes: we give regular pocket money, which our children spend entirely as they choose; we back that up with the occasional well-intentioned chat; we buy them the bigger things they need; and we hope for the best.

Unfortunately, this approach has two enormous drawbacks. First, lectures are boring. Second, giving children money or things for ‘free’ fails to teach them how the real world works. As to hoping for the best – well, it’s not the ideal tactic to rely on.

But there is a better way to go about it, and that’s what this book is about. The Pocket Money Plan can enable you to teach your child to manage money for life.

The Pocket Money Plan, by Julie Hedge is available to buy online at Amazon