Money can be a very tough subject for you and your kids, but you're probably doing something right if you're talking about it with them at all.

Nathan Dungan can help you start your kids on the right track.

Dungan is an author, award-winning speaker and national expert on family finances and the effects of mass marketing on young people.

A top-performing financial adviser and vice president of marketing for a Fortune 500 financial services company, he founded Share-Save-Spend LLC, an organization that helps people of all ages develop and maintain healthy financial habits.

Dungan offers insight drawn from his highly successful Share-Save-Spend approach to money. "Having a balanced approach to financial matters means aligning what you care about with how you use your money. While this sounds simple enough, it becomes seriously complicated by the compounding pressure on young people to spend, spend, spend, and to reach for an upscale lifestyle," Dungan said.

Dungan offers a Share-Save-Spend tip, a question to prompt money discussions with your children, and a gotta-have-it-now fact that illustrates the incredible influence mass marketing has on our children.

I recently read an article in the Washington Post about how the creators of Hello Kitty were introducing a debit card to their ultra successful line of consumer products.

According to the Hello Kitty Web site, the following are two of the "benefits" for acquiring the debit card:

1. "Freedom! You can use the Hello Kitty Debit MasterCard to shop 'til you drop at millions of locations."
2. "With the Hello Kitty Debit MasterCard you will learn great money management skills. Remember that you can only spend the amount that is loaded on the card."

So, what money management skills will you really learn? For starters, you will learn how expensive cards linked to products like Hello Kitty really are. The activation fee is $14.95, the annual renewal fee is $14.95, the monthly maintenance fee is $2.95, the ATM fee is $1.50 per use and finally there is a $1.00 per minute fee to talk with a customer service agent.

Hopefully you will also learn that this is a "preview of coming attractions." Companies will continue to offer similar cards to kids because the potential market is enormous. There are 80 million young people under 25 in the United States and they spend and influence the spending of more than $1 trillion a year.

Bottom line: There are thousands of consumer product companies trying to shape the spending habits of your child. However, no one can neutralize the impact of their efforts like attentive parents who have a process (share-save-spend) for teaching their kids about money.

What would you do if your child asked to sign up for a debit card linked to a product like Hello Kitty?

While the obvious answer might be an emphatic "no", I would encourage you to use the opportunity for further discussion. Think about the tools (e.g. checking accounts, savings accounts, etc.) you currently have in place for teaching your child how to manage money. If you aren’t utilizing these or other options, perhaps now is the time to institute a system for teaching healthy financial habits.

The Money Talks question is designed to build on the Share-Save-Spend tip for the week and can be used as a springboard for additional conversations with family and friends.

According to USA Today, big name companies such as Kellogg, Toys R Us, Procter & Gamble, Samsung and McDonald's, are just a few of the corporations that will be paying $150 million in marketing dollars to Disney. The marketing deals are for promotional tie-ins with "The Incredibles," a new movie from Disney and Pixar studios.

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