New Topic - Young People In The Hobby

twoods and doubleeagle59- it does appear we all got started in much the same way.

twoods- that isn't a bad idea about a contest. I don't have a lot of canadian coins except a few olympic silver commemoratives my Mom gave me many years ago. I do have a good pile of tokens (mostly american) I could donate.

My father is in his eighties and still collects coins. I am one of five children and two of us collect. I have three adult children and one is really into it, another who dabbles in currency collection. The other not.

I wonder if there is a correlation between a child becoming a collector if a parent or close relative is. Maybe many young people are not interested because the parents were not either.

I think part of my early interest was from being in the Scout movement and needing a hobby to get my collectors badge. I don't see as many children in Girl Guides and Scouts as there used to be. There are more activities and pastimes out there to syphon off a child's time and money than in years gone by it seems to me.

I have a granddaughter almost six. I recently got her a blank album for nickels. She comes over about once a week and I give her a nickel every time she visits (I keep track of what years she is missing). Will she become a collector? I don't know. She does like to go with me to the bank to get rolls of coins to roll search since she knows they have a candy jar at the bank!

To be fair though, I was there on a weekday. Maybe the kiddos showed up on Saturday when school was out.

A lot of antique & collectable segments are a lot worse off than coins. I go to a few estate auctions and the average age has to be 70+. Nobody wants their deceased relative's collection of Hummel figurines.

A lot of younger coin collectors these days never set foot into a coin shop or coin show so they are harder to see and count.

Joe2007 - You might be right about younger collectors. I know there are tons of them of this forum alone.

Great job raising awareness Dustin.

I have been going to coin shows for nearly 40 years and even back then in my 20's most customers / dealers were white men 40 and up.

There is a lot to learn just to become an educated collector but especially a dealer today with more counterfeits showing up all over the place. The education you would need to be a successful dealer doesn't come in a few years unless you start VERY young.

We have some promising YN's here in the forums that may make a great dealer before their hair turns gray

Good question! In my case it's not really true. My father was an economist, but with much more interest in banking and accounting principles, where my mother and her mother always had a raised interest in coins and currencies, but didn't do any collecting.

One of my LCS's changed ownership from father to son a few years ago and currently the next generation is being trained to take over again. So I guess sometimes it just runs in the family.




Nobody probably knows what Hummel figurines are anymore, let alone if they have any value. It seems to go with a lot of hobbies like that: figurine collecting is virtually dead here, stamp collecting is dead and buried here, most other collectible hobbies share the same fate: only coin collecting still is alive, somehow. However... one of my LCS's sometimes looks more like a weekly meeting center for the elderly than a shop, given how many retired there are on a given Thursday evening. It's just that most of my friends and relatives know that I am somehow a reincarnation from the stone age that they accept that I have 'elderly' hobbies, but a lot of people actually give me a strange look when they find out where my interests lie.




Keep up the good work!