The Globe and Mail

Adults aren't the only ones taking stock of online-investment opportunities. Cyber investing and planning for it have become child's play, too.

While the piggy bank and first bank account remain staples in starting young consumers on the savings road, the Internet has become key in getting them interested in piling up interest.

Consumer and financial industry groups, securities regulators and educators are reaching out to young people with online educational tools (special websites, webinars, mock investment programs, investment clubs, to name a few) to help raise their money-managing IQs, curb their debt and get them into investing mode.

"One of the concerns we have with our young people is there isn't an opportunity for them to learn to manage their own investments," says Duncan Hannay, managing director, head of online brokerage for the Bank of Nova Scotia, referring to the fact most provinces don't make financial literacy a part of the curriculum.

"My own 16-year-old daughter can speak confidently about a company's balance sheet, but has little understanding of her own balance sheet. It's a fundamental challenge we have with young people, not focusing on it early enough."

Given young people's insatiable online habits, cyber-investing education makes sense - and the more parents are involved the better, Mr. Hannay says from his Toronto office.

An Ipsos-Reid survey of 4,466 respondents that was commissioned by Telus and released in September suggests that three-quarters of Canadian children in families who use the Internet are proficient on it by age seven.

First grade children follow a lesson on their new laptops at a school in Caracas. — JORGE SILVA/REUTERS

"Young people are very savvy, quite capable of multi-tasking, and are very connected, so the online space and transacting online is not foreign or daunting to them whatsoever," Mr. Hannay says. "They can easily adopt the online tools available to them to manage their own online investments."

Paula Carello's sons, Anthony, 12, and Corey, 9, have been saving in the piggy banks she made them out of water-cooler jugs since they were toddlers. But it wasn't until the family got hooked on online account-managing and investing education that they started to gain real financial know-how.

Ms. Carello, an aesthetics expert who works in Toronto, says she has Registered Education Savings Plans (RESPs) for both her sons, and shows them online how their accounts are growing. She has also started a Tax-Free Savings Account (TFSA) for Anthony, a Grade 7 French immersion student at Julliard Public School in Vaughan, Ont., and they go online monthly to move money from Anthony's savings account to his TFSA. Anthony can't start his own online investment account because you must 18 or older to do so.