Conference Program

In contemporary societies, where individuals are increasingly required to mobilise knowledge and competences to manage their financial resources and make informed decisions (Martin, 2002), institutional and academic interest in financial literacy has grown substantially. Financial literacy is widely recognised as a key lever for the development of financial capability and, consequently, for the achievement of financial well-being (CFPB, 2015; Sherraden, 2013; Willis, 2022). As a result, financial education initiatives have proliferated and, in some countries – such as Italy – financial education is scheduled to be incorporated into school curricula, starting from primary education.

However, although processes of financial socialisation begin in early childhood (Bottazzi & Lusardi, 2020; Drever et al., 2015; Rinaldi, 2015), educational proposals addressing core financial concepts – such as risk, uncertainty, time and value – remain rare in pre-school settings. Moreover, the literature lacks experimental studies assessing the impact of play-based financial education interventions on sufficiently large samples of children aged three to five (Gerasimova et al., 2022; Kamber et al., 2024; Ramli et al., 2022).

A research project currently in its conceptualisation and planning phase is therefore presented, pending the securing of the resources required for its implementation, in order to obtain feedback and advice to support its optimal development.

The project seeks to evaluate the impact of financial education on the attitudes and behaviours of pre-school children. More specifically, it examines whether play-based activities targeting children aged three to five can leave a lasting imprint on financial socialisation processes, fostering more virtuous developments in attitudes and behaviours. The core research question is: do children who have experienced play-based financial education show, one or two years later, systematically different attitudes and behaviours compared with those who have not?

Adopting a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the study will be conducted in partnership with Reggio Children Foundation, which promotes the Reggio Emilia Approach internationally, and in collaboration with pedagogists and teachers. The sample will consist of approximately 5,000 children attending nursery schools adopting the same educational approach but located in four markedly different socio-economic, cultural, technological and financial contexts: an Italian province, where such schools are public and attended by children from all kinds of family backgrounds; the cities of Milan and Paris, where they are private and subject to access constraints; and San Francisco, where they are even elitist.

Within each context, schools will be divided into three homogeneous groups based on average parental financial literacy: one will serve as the control group, while the other two will constitute treatment groups (with variations in timing and frequency of the proposed activities). The findings are expected to confirm differences in financial socialisation across contexts; a key objective, however, is to assess whether structured interventions in early years allow children to co-construct knowledge on concepts that can be linked to financial literacy.