What should you teach your kids about money? How should you raise them to handle it sensibly? How do you teach the right financial values and priorities?

These questions have long challenged parents. And parents nowadays face an even tougher battle.

Young people today don’t have access to the cheap college degrees, job stability, and retirement pensions of a bygone era. While life for them is much richer in terms of health care and career and lifestyle choice, it is also more economically dangerous and complex.

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So what is the best way to teach kids about money? New York Times’ personal finance columnist (and parent) Ron Lieber offers answers in his new book “The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous, and Smart About Money.”

Lieber calls his book “a generational manifesto,” and much of it looks at how parents grapple with imparting the right financial values to their children. Here are 10 key takeaways from the reading:

1. Talk about money: Talk to your kids more — and more openly — about money matters. (Lieber, controversially, argues you should tell your kids how much you earn — at least at an appropriate age.) Don’t be embarrassed. You can’t teach them about money if you don’t talk about it. Silence about money, in a phrase Lieber quotes, is “institutionalized adultism.” And it hurts your kids.

2. Start an allowance: The earlier the better — and ideally no later than first grade. The sooner you start training your children to handle money, the more skilled they’ll become.

3. Don’t overindulge: You’re not helping kids in the long term if you lavish them with gifts and don’t give them responsibilities, rules or boundaries. Some even believe that overindulgence is a form of child neglect, hindering their normal development to face the real world with confidence.

4. Split their allowance: Put money into three “buckets”: spending, saving, and giving away to charity, Lieber advises. Train them early to handle each of these three financial responsibilities. Lieber, for example, puts his daughter’s allowance into three plastic containers marked “Spend,” “Save” and “Give.”

5. Let kids work. The key word is “let,” not “force.” Kids want to work and do things. Give them plenty of chores and responsibilities. Lieber contends that you probably shouldn’t pay your kids for regular household chores, such as taking out the trash, but do pay when they go above and beyond, such as (let’s say) repainting the garage.

6. Teach commitment: Tell children they must pay for at least one semester of college. Even if you cover the rest of the tuition, they will at least have a manageable and achievable savings goal.

7. Train them to analyze costs: Mary Matthieson, a scientist and mother, taught her children to estimate the amount of fun they’d get per dollar spent on any given toy, Lieber relates. She found they then started to think more about which toys were a better deal than others. Talk about a great way to introduce kids to the concept of return on investment. (By the way, according to the Matthieson family the ROI, or FPD (fun per dollar) of a simple deck of playing cards crushes every other toy.)

8. Train them to make choices:Lieber tells how Dana Treister, a grandmother in Chicago, takes each grandkid on their birthday to a dollar store and gives them dollars to spend —and sets no time limit while they choose. It’s a practical lesson in allocating scarce resources to meet conflicting wants — Economics 101.

9. Teach financial self-defense: Marketers and advertisers are the enemy. “They want your money!” psychology professor Tim Kasser taught his sons, and it became a family motto. Lieber illustrates how when the Kassers watch television, they mute the sound during the commercials and make up their own dialogue to replace the inane babble scripted by the advertising agency. It’s never too soon to teach your children to fend off the agents of marketing propaganda.

10. Involve the kids in giving:As Lieber tells it, Laura Sundquist, a mother and financial planner in Connecticut, gives her sons 12 checks in a modest amount each at the start of every year. Each month they have to send a check to a charity. This gets them researching different charities, choosing between them, and thinking more about giving, the needs of others, and the value of money. Terrific idea.

It’s a brave new world. Your kids need to be prepared.