Should I save for my kids' future or my own retirement first?

You opened this tab because you feel guilty either way.

Save for yourself and you’re a bad parent. Save for your kids and you’re being irresponsible about your own future. Either direction you turn, there’s a quiet voice telling you you’re getting it wrong.

That voice isn’t wisdom. It’s a money script — and understanding where it comes from might be the most useful thing you read today.

What’s actually happening in your brain

Dr Brad Klontz, financial psychologist and researcher at Creighton University, coined the term money scripts to describe the unconscious beliefs we form about money — usually before age ten, usually absorbed from watching the adults around us.

These scripts aren’t logical. They don’t update when your circumstances change. They just run in the background, quietly steering decisions that feel like choices but are actually reflexes.

One of the most common scripts Klontz identified goes something like: “Good parents sacrifice for their children.” Another, often sitting right next to it: “You have to look after yourself before you can look after anyone else.”

Both scripts are in there. Both feel true. That’s why the question feels impossible — you’re not weighing two financial options, you’re watching two deeply held identity beliefs arm-wrestle.

Why standard financial advice doesn’t help here

Most financial content will tell you the answer is obvious: prioritise your pension. Your kids can borrow for university; you can’t borrow for retirement. Put on your own oxygen mask first.

Whether that fits you depends on your own situation. And either way, it won’t move you.

Here’s why. When a decision feels identity-threatening — when it makes you feel like a bad mother, a selfish person, someone who got their priorities wrong — the rational part of your brain goes quiet and the emotional part takes over.

This is what psychologists call affect heuristic (Slovic, Finucane, Peters, MacGregor, 2002): we don’t evaluate risk and reward neutrally. We feel our way to a conclusion first, then construct a logical story afterwards. If contributing to your own pension feels selfish, no amount of compound interest graphs will shift that feeling.

And if you’re in a shame spiral about money already — if you’ve avoided looking at this properly for a while — the identity threat is even louder. Looking at the numbers feels like confirming you’ve already failed.

So you stay stuck. Or you fudge it. A bit here, a bit there, nothing structured, nothing that actually works.

The present-future tradeoff (and why your kids complicate it)

There’s a second layer to this, which is the well-documented tension between present and future selves.

Behavioural economist Richard Thaler’s work on mental accounting and Kahneman’s research on temporal discounting both point to the same problem: our brains are terrible at giving future-you the same weight as present-you. The version of you at 68, needing money, is genuinely hard to feel connected to. She’s abstract. She doesn’t feel urgent.

Your child’s needs feel urgent right now, today, viscerally.

The problem isn’t that you value your kids too much. It’s that your brain can’t feel the future — and that asymmetry quietly warps every financial decision you make.

This isn’t a character flaw. It’s a feature of human cognition that holds across cultures, income levels, and education. You are not the exception.

But it does mean that any plan you make has to account for it. Relying on willpower — just deciding to change what you save for — almost never works long-term if the underlying identity script hasn’t been examined.

What actually changes the equation

Let me give you the structural facts, cleanly, because they matter.

• Pensions can come with money attached. Many employers pay in when you do. Pensions also get tax relief, which means some of the tax you paid goes into the pot. How much depends on your scheme and your tax position.
• Your kids have options you don’t. Student loans in the UK are income-contingent and arguably more like a graduate tax than a traditional debt. Many graduates repay far less than they borrowed before the loan is written off. Your pension has no equivalent fallback.
• Time matters with pensions. Because of compounding, money put in earlier has longer to grow, if it grows. Investments can go down as well as up, so nothing here is promised.
• A financially secure parent is not a burden on their children. This is the part the guilt script never shows you. The alternative — reaching retirement with insufficient savings and relying on your adult children — is a much heavier weight to place on them.

None of this is to say never save for your kids. Junior ISAs, gifting, helping with a house deposit — these are all meaningful things. What order is right for your family depends on your own numbers. MoneyHelper explains how pensions and saving for children work. It’s free and backed by the government.

The specific small action worth taking this week

Don’t overhaul everything. Don’t build a spreadsheet. Don’t set a budget.

Just do this one thing: find out what your employer pays into your pension, and how it works.

Log in to your payslip portal or email your HR team. One question: “What does my employer pay into my pension, and how does that work?”

That’s it. No commitment to change anything yet. Just information.

This works because it lowers the psychological cost of engagement. Research on implementation intentions (Gollwitzer, 1999) shows that the more specific and small a first step is, the more likely it is to happen — and that taking any action on a goal you’ve been avoiding reduces the avoidance behaviour over time.

You’re not deciding your whole financial future. You’re just finding out one number.

The script that’s worth rewriting

Here’s the thing about identity money scripts: they’re not fixed. Klontz’s clinical work, and the broader literature on cognitive behavioural approaches to financial behaviour, consistently shows that when you name the script, it loses some of its power.

The script “good parents sacrifice for their children” sounds noble. But run it forward: a parent who reaches their 60s financially depleted, anxious, dependent — did the script actually protect anyone?

The rewrite isn’t “be selfish.” The rewrite is: “Securing my own financial stability is part of how I take care of my family.”

That’s not a mantra. It’s a structurally accurate description of how family financial systems work across a lifetime.

You are allowed to hold that belief. You don’t have to earn it.

Ready to go deeper?

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Or book a free Cash Flow Session about The Money Story Method, my 12-week 1:1 programme.

Joel