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Many teenagers today have access to credit and debit cards and until recently, there was little parents could do to monitor and restrict their children's spending. Hernandez has identified a new prepaid card by Discover that aims to give parents more control over their children's spending habits. The prepaid card allows parents to restrict and actively monitor their teenager's credit card use. For a small monthly fee, parents can effectively control all aspects of their child's card and even restrict purchases of inappropriate material. Discover's prepaid card offers parents and teenagers an opportunity to enjoy the conveniences of a credit/debit card with relative safety.

In this prospective study home literacy is considered a multifaceted phenomenon consisting of a frequency or exposure facet (opportunity), an instruction quality facet, a parent-child cooperation facet, and a social-emotional quality facet. In a multiethnic, partly bilingual sample of 89 families with 4-year-old children, living in inner-city areas in the Netherlands, measures of home literacy were taken by means of interviews with the parents and observations of parent-child book reading interactions when the target children were ages 4, 5, and 6 years. At age 7, by the end of Grade 1, after nearly 1 year of formal reading instruction, vocabulary, word decoding, and reading comprehension were assessed using standard tests. Vocabulary at age 4 and an index of the predominant language used at home were also measured in order to be used as covariates. Correlational and multiple regression analyses supported the hypothesis that home literacy is multifaceted. Home literacy facets together predicted more variance in language and achievement measures at age 7 than each of them separately. Structural equations analysis also supported two additional hypotheses of the present research. First, the effects of background factors (SES, ethnicity, parents' own literacy practices) on language development and reading achievement in school were fully mediated by home literacy, home language, and early vocabulary. Second, even after controlling for the effects of early vocabulary and predominant home language, there remained statistically significant effects of home literacy, in particular, opportunity, instruction quality, and cooperation quality. (Abstract taken from JSTOR.)

The article discuses how parents can prepare their children entering college about financial literacy. It is important that freshman understand the intricacies of credit cards such as, interest rates and fees.