Posted 03/30/2010 3:25 pm
Hi Ugly (lol suddenly I feel rude) I can offer some tips that may be helpful to you.
When I was very young my mother collected coins and other things. I was allowed to stand in the doorway of the room and watch her doing her coin thing but was never allowed to touch. Occasionally I was allowed to come closer to see something that she found particularly interesting. This greatly inspired me to to do 2 things, 1 was that I wanted my own coins that I would be allowed to touch whenever I wanted, 2 it showed me that coins are important enough that you need to be extremely careful with them even to the extent of a "no touch" rule.
When I was around 7 or 8 my mom gave me an old whitman folder full of lincoln cents, no key dates though. and from that point on I did my own collecting.
Now I myself have a daughter that seems to be repeating history. I had the same rule since she was a toddler. she could hang around and chat with me but touch NOTHING. And she responded the same way as I did. She wanted her own coins to sit and sort through.
The best bit of advice I can offer you is this, because it is a junior collector and children respond to limitations badly sometimes..... do not place rules for his collection. It is his and his responsibility. Don't find the coins for him, don't choose the starting point for him, don't replace anything he damages. Just take him to a coin store with a spending limit and let him go at the junk bins and sort through.
With Caitlin, I give her a $5 or $10 bag of coins and she will sit for hours with her little loupe and she has her own feelings about which coins she loves. At this point her favorite is still the lincoln cents and I give them to her by the jar full. She is quite good at spotting doubling and setting them aside and also at sorting by decade and as I said... she's only six.
If he is a natural coin collector by heart, he will love anything he has access to and will gradually learn how to care for them. I started my daughter with a binder with maybe 5 binder pages and she did not like that. she now has a wooden box that she hides in her room and that seems to be more her style.
Also, be prepared (and don't be surprised) if you take him to the junk bins and he decides that collecting canadian is not the most interesting choice to him. My daughter loves to find farthings and large pennies.
Good luck with it all! It can be very stressful to see them be to rough, or too neglectful and I certainly break a sweat trying to not control her decisions for her but she has to learn on her own. even if that means wrecking a coin and feeling sad later. (i did end up ruining my first folder of lincoln cents by the way lol)
When I was very young my mother collected coins and other things. I was allowed to stand in the doorway of the room and watch her doing her coin thing but was never allowed to touch. Occasionally I was allowed to come closer to see something that she found particularly interesting. This greatly inspired me to to do 2 things, 1 was that I wanted my own coins that I would be allowed to touch whenever I wanted, 2 it showed me that coins are important enough that you need to be extremely careful with them even to the extent of a "no touch" rule.
When I was around 7 or 8 my mom gave me an old whitman folder full of lincoln cents, no key dates though. and from that point on I did my own collecting.
Now I myself have a daughter that seems to be repeating history. I had the same rule since she was a toddler. she could hang around and chat with me but touch NOTHING. And she responded the same way as I did. She wanted her own coins to sit and sort through.
The best bit of advice I can offer you is this, because it is a junior collector and children respond to limitations badly sometimes..... do not place rules for his collection. It is his and his responsibility. Don't find the coins for him, don't choose the starting point for him, don't replace anything he damages. Just take him to a coin store with a spending limit and let him go at the junk bins and sort through.
With Caitlin, I give her a $5 or $10 bag of coins and she will sit for hours with her little loupe and she has her own feelings about which coins she loves. At this point her favorite is still the lincoln cents and I give them to her by the jar full. She is quite good at spotting doubling and setting them aside and also at sorting by decade and as I said... she's only six.
If he is a natural coin collector by heart, he will love anything he has access to and will gradually learn how to care for them. I started my daughter with a binder with maybe 5 binder pages and she did not like that. she now has a wooden box that she hides in her room and that seems to be more her style.
Also, be prepared (and don't be surprised) if you take him to the junk bins and he decides that collecting canadian is not the most interesting choice to him. My daughter loves to find farthings and large pennies.
Good luck with it all! It can be very stressful to see them be to rough, or too neglectful and I certainly break a sweat trying to not control her decisions for her but she has to learn on her own. even if that means wrecking a coin and feeling sad later. (i did end up ruining my first folder of lincoln cents by the way lol)
