If their grandma was anything like mine, she didn’t know I wanted a secret stash of money for X or Y, what she knew was that my parents unfairly controlled and removed money from my account, which since they’re my parents was legal so she couldn’t call the cops or something, and she knew that all she could do was her part to help by slipping me a $20 and saying “don’t tell your mother.”
Sure, it’s not the end of the world, kids get abused all the time worse than that and survive. Still lame though.
Like I said to the other commenter, I am very sympathetic to what sounds like an awful childhood, I just don’t think it’s much of an argument in support of cash.
What about kids that don’t have a grandma like that? Or who’s parents discover the Toiletries their kid bought?
Much better to focus on supporting kids being neglected in a general sense rather than relying on the existence of cash.
So since some kids don’t have a nice grandma, the ones that do should suffer while we “fix” it? No. Tell you what, you fix it, then we can talk about going cashless. Why should those kids suffer while we work towards a fix, you think we just flip a switch and all of a sudden every parent is a good parent? I hate to be the one to show you what it’s like down here outside of your ivory tower but there is no such instant solution, unfortunately we do not have an all powerful benevolent dictator (I guess, /s) who can change things at will, our system is slow.
That’s the thing though. No one is talking about going cashless - there’s just a general anxiety that because no one uses cash governments will discontinue it.
I’m not arguing that cash should be discontinued, merely that this odd grandma argument isn’t really an argument in favour of the use of cash generally.