What Selling Girl Scout Cookies Is Teaching My 8-Year-Olds About Money

It's a fun and eye-opening experience.

Ask the typical parent with daughters in Girl Scouts what they think about selling cookies, and you might get anything from an eye roll to a full-blown "I hate it." The reality is that selling those cookies can be a lot of work for the parents. We're the ones who need to reach out to friends and family, confirm orders, and drive our daughters around to deliver those orders once they come in. We're also the ones who have to stand there with them (often in the cold) for hours while they set up cookie sale booths in town in an effort to drum up sales.

But despite the work involved, I do feel that selling Girl Scout cookies is a rewarding experience for my daughters. And they even get to learn a financial lesson in the process.

How Girl Scout cookie sales work

When you sell Girl Scout cookies, your troop gets a portion of the proceeds. You can then use that money to pay for things like troop activities and supplies.

Now, the amount of money your troop will earn from each box will hinge on where you're located and what your local council's rules are. It will also depend on how many boxes you sell. But for the most part, you're generally getting less than a dollar for your troop per box of Girl Scout cookies sold. That means you need to sell a decent number of boxes to be able to fund a few nice activities.

My daughters, who are 8-year-old twins, are aware of how the program works. And so they're very motivated to sit out in the cold if it means selling more cookies and getting more money for trips and such. And frankly, that alone is a good lesson. It's teaching them not to expect things to just be handed to them, but rather, to work for them.

Also, my daughters obviously need my help to deliver the cookies they sell to friends and family. But they come along to every delivery, and if they can't make it in person, they write a thank-you note to the purchaser.

Just as importantly, once our troop pools funds from the cookie sales, the girls sit down as a group, review the numbers, make a budget, and decide how to use that money. They recognize that their funds are limited and that they need to work together to prioritize the activities that are most important to them. This, to me, is another worthwhile skill.

An effort worth making

Last year, when some fellow Girl Scout parents and I were deep in the throes of cookie season, I turned to a friend and said something like, "I'd rather just take $50 out of my savings and give the troop the money than have to stand here for another minute in the cold trying to sell these boxes." And of course, my fellow parents agreed.

But in reality, selling cookies does teach my daughters valuable skills. So even though handing over the money out of my pocket and skipping the cookie sales is the easier way out, it's not a lesson I want to teach.

I don't want my children to ever think they don't have to work hard because their parents will just bail them out. I have friends in their 30s and 40s whose parents still occasionally pay their credit card bills because they can't manage their money well enough on their own. And frankly, that's not a situation I want my kids to land in.

I'm not going to be so bold as to say that selling Girl Scout cookies will help my daughters and their fellow troop-mates avoid that scenario as adults. But I'm hoping that between the skills they pick up from their cookie sales and the lessons I teach them at home, they'll understand what it means to work for money rather than have it handed to them.