As will many children in middle and high school. Most of them don’t want their peers singling them out as having more or less than others, so they may try harder than you think to keep the information private. For some families, this advice will work only selectively. Ms. Adams, who wrote the book “Heart Warriors” about her son’s heart disease, shields him from knowledge of the family’s medical bills. Child patients often feel guilty for inconveniencing their families.

Families who struggle generally, or are experiencing a period of unemployment, are naturally among the most reticent. Still, even the youngest generally understand when budgets have become tighter and want to know why. Pretending that there hasn’t been a reduction in income or some other difficult circumstance doesn’t help them. “If you are not talking to them, then they are drawing their own conclusions,” said Sara Solnick, an associate professor of economics at the University of Vermont who has written about social comparison. Leveling with them about the reality and how you’re managing it may help ease their fears.

When Andrea Dutton and her husband separated and she moved with her 7-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son to a smaller house in Gainesville, Fla., she addressed the matter simply. “I’m not apologizing to them about it,” she said. “I want them to realize that the right decision is not always the easy one. I’d rather have them see that you can do the right thing and get out of a bad situation even if it means taking a hit financially.”

Image “The Opposite of Spoiled” will be published by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, in February. Credit... James Nieves/The New York Times

Keep in mind that if you are planning on applying for financial aid for college, you will have no choice but to disclose your financial information when your child is a senior in high school. That’s because anyone who wants financial aid must fill out a form called the Fafsa. It asks for information about income and assets. Parents sign it, and so must the students; everyone attests to the accuracy of the information.

Coming clean about income and assets can pose special challenges if you are truly wealthy; you may worry that children will flaunt their good fortune or think they never have to work. But you don’t get a pass: If you don’t work (or don’t work much), older children will wonder how the family affords its life. At the very least, it’s worth trying some starter exercises, like showing your children the details of what a vacation or a second home actually costs. Explain, too, that it requires a great deal of money to throw off whatever dividends and interest contribute to the family budget, and that the investments that do so may not last or may not fall to the next generation if the children don’t make something of themselves in college and beyond.

Our Money, Our Values

Given the near inevitability that parents will have to disclose their incomes or their children will find out some other way, it’s best to think of that moment of revelation and the years leading up to it as opportunities. For those of us who have at least a little bit more than what we need to scrape by, what we spend says a lot about what we stand for; how we determine value is a reflection of our values. The same is true for whatever we have left over each month. How much do we save? Why does it fluctuate? Who has helped us, what do we give to people who have less, and why don’t we give more? It’s impossible to answer these questions for children with conviction and clarity if they don’t know the size of the number at the beginning of the equation.