My summer holiday began on July 5th. I didn't want to stay at home and did nothing in the hot summer. I called my grandma, and she asked me to go to her village. I was very happy with it. After four hours, I got to my grandma's house by bus. There are many trees around her house. I liked to play games with other children during the day. At night, people in the neighborhood often came and sat together to chat. My grandma liked telling stories. My new friends and I enjoyed her stories very much.

    There is a pool in the village. My friends and I often went there with some food and caught fish in the pool. Then we cooked the fish and had dinner there. It was not easy to catch fish, but it was interesting and exciting. I stayed there for about a month, and then I went back home.

    I found out one time that doing a favor for someone could get you into a lot of trouble. I was in the eighth grade at the time, and we were having a final test. During the test, the girl sitting next to me whispered something, but I didn't understand. So I leaned over her way and found out that she was trying to ask me if I had an extra pen. She showed me that hers was out of ink and would not write. I happened to have an extra one, so I took it out of my pocket and put it on her desk.

    Later, after the test papers had been turned in, the teacher asked me to stay in the room when all the other students were dismissed. As soon as we were alone she began to talk to me about what it meant to grow up; she talked about how important it was to stand on your own two feet and be responsible (负责任) for your own acts. For a long time, she talked about honesty and emphasized the fact that when people do something dishonest, they are really cheating themselves. She made me promise that I would think seriously about all the things she had said, and then she told me I could leave. I walked out of the room wondering why she had chosen to talk to me about all those things.

    Later on, I found out that she thought I had cheated on the test. When she saw me lean over to talk to the girl next to me, it looked as if I was copying answers from the girl's test paper. I tried to explain about the pen, but all she could say was it seemed very very strange to her that I hadn't talked of anything about the pen the day she talked to me right after the test. Even if I tried to explain that I was just doing the girl a favor by letting her use my pen, I am sure she continued to believe that I had cheated on the test.

    In 2009 a group of parents in Lymington started sharing worries about their children's money-management skills. Pocket money was now stored in a building society rather than a piggy bank (储蓄罐); household shopping was done online; the children rarely saw their parents handling cash. They were spending online, too. Money had become intangible. How, then, were children to learn its value?

The answer they came up with was GoHenry, an app now available in America as well as Britain. It is designed to help young people learn good spending habits through real-world money activities. Parents sign up with their own bank accounts and pay a monthly fee of £2.99 or $3.99 for each child aged six or over. Adults and children download separate versions. Parents can schedule pocket money and set chores. When those are marked as done, the child is paid the agreed amount. Parents can see what the child has bought and where. And they can choose where the card can be used: in shops, online or at ATMs.

Children get cards printed with their name. They can put money in savings pots, view their spending and balances, and set savings targets. "They could decide to save ten dollars for a friend's birthday in four weeks' time, or set a goal at 12 to have $2,000 to buy a car at age 18," says Dean Brauer, one of GoHenry's founders. "The app tells them how much to save each week to meet their goal."

A big benefit of such apps is that they inspire family conversations about money. According to the latest research, more than half of British parents find the subject hard to discuss with their children. And yet most agree that children's attitudes to money are formed in their early years.

Some GoHenry customers are wealthy parents who worry that their children will grow up with little knowledge of money. Others have slim incomes but regard the app as a preparation for their child's future. Some say that they have been in debt and want their children to avoid that mistake when they grow up; others that the app is cost-effective because their children learn to plan spending. Even though young people no longer touch and hold money, they can still be taught to handle it well.