Why My High Schooler Struggles to Count Coins (And What We’re Doing That Actually Helps)
The self-checkout screen at our neighborhood Kroger had been blinking “INSERT PAYMENT” for 52 seconds when Javi, my 15-year-old sophomore, shifted his mud-caked cross country hoodie and half-turned toward me. “Can you come here?” he mumbled, loud enough only I could hear over the beep of the register next to us. In his cupped palm, he held $1.39 in loose change he’d grabbed from the mason jar by our front door for his post-practice Gatorade, and he couldn’t make it add to the $1.18 he owed.
I stepped around the stack of reusable bags and sorted it in 10 seconds: two quarters for 50, three dimes for 30, three pennies for 3, done. We walked out to the car and he was quiet for the first two stoplights, picking at the label on his bottle. “I don’t get why I can’t do that,” he said finally. “Everyone else in culinary class last month could do the bake sale register. When I messed up, Tyler made a joke about me being a 15-year-old who can’t do first grade math.”
I’d never really thought about it before. When Javi was in first and second grade, we did the standard piggy bank counting, the plastic play money worksheets, all that. Then he got older, allowance went straight to Venmo for game skins and fast food runs with friends, we all switched to tap-to-pay for everything, and loose change just became that thing that accumulates in jacket pockets and the bottom of my purse. I figured he’d picked up the skill along the way, the same way he picked up how to order Uber Eats or connect a new controller to the Switch. It never crossed my mind that he’d reach high school still fumbling with it.
I mentioned it in a parent-teacher email to his algebra teacher a week later, mostly as an offhand joke about kids growing up all digital. She wrote back right away and said she sees three or four kids a year in 10th grade who can’t reliably count loose change, and most of the time, everyone writes it off as a “cash is dead” joke. But for half those kids, she said, it’s not just lack of exposure. It’s a working memory snag that flew under the radar for years, because elementary school money math only lasts a couple weeks, and after that, everyone moves on to fractions and algebra and never comes back to it.
That clicked for me. Javi’s always been the kind of kid who loses his train of thought mid-sentence if someone walks past the room, who has to write down every step of a long algebra problem even when the teacher says he can do it in his head. Counting coins the way most of us learn it—pick one up, add it to the total, pick up the next, keep a running number going—takes up a ton of that mental working memory space. Add the pressure of a line of people waiting behind you, or a friend making a joke, and that space just vanishes. He knows what each coin is worth. He can multiply 25 by 8 in his head faster than I can half the time. He just can’t hold six different numbers in his head at once while he’s sorting through a handful of metal.
That night after dinner, we dumped the whole change jar out on the kitchen table, next to the leftover carnitas and the half-empty jar of salsa. He crossed his arms and said this was stupid, that he’d just never use cash anyway, everything takes Apple Pay. I didn’t argue with him about adulting or being “prepared for the real world.” I just said, “That concert you’re going to next month? The fairgrounds parking lot only takes cash, $15 a car. Your friend’s mom is driving, and you’re supposed to Venmo her your share, but if she forgets to stop at an ATM, you don’t want to be the guy holding up 20 cars while you count quarters.” He rolled his eyes, but he leaned forward.
First try, he did it the way he always tried, picking coins up one by one and muttering the running total under his breath. He got $12.70 for a pile that was actually $8.40, huffed, and pushed the whole mess away like he was going to get up and leave. I didn’t tell him to try harder. I just showed him what the bank teller does when you bring in a jar of change: sort all the same coins into separate piles first. Quarters in one, dimes in another, nickels, pennies. Count how many you have of each, multiply, add the four totals at the end.
It sounds so obvious to me now, but no one ever taught him that. The first grade worksheets all have pictures of mixed coins and tell you to add them one by one. Sorting first cuts the number of things he has to remember from 15 or 20 individual coins to four simple numbers. He tried it that way, got the total right on the first go, and blinked like he couldn’t believe it. “That’s way easier,” he said.
We didn’t turn it into a daily drill, because I know that would have made him check out immediately. We made two small, low-friction changes instead. First, half his weekly allowance now comes in cash, small bills and change, instead of all of it going to Venmo. He can convert it to digital whenever he wants, but he has to count it first. Second, whenever I use cash at a store or the food truck down the street, I hand him the change the cashier gives me and ask him to double-check that I got the right amount. No one’s waiting on him, no one’s listening, and if he gets it wrong I just glance over and we sort it together.
I also stopped jumping in to do it for him when we’re out, but I don’t make him do it in front of a line if he doesn’t want to. Last month at the farmers market, he wanted to buy a $3 bag of peaches from the stand by the entrance, and he stepped off to the side of the booth for 30 seconds to sort the coins in his palm before he walked up. He paid, got his change, and texted me a blurry selfie with the peach bag 10 minutes later captioned “certified cash handler.” Two weeks after that, he fumbled a whole handful of quarters at the taco truck after the movie, dropped one under the truck, and had to ask the vendor to give him a minute. He was flustered, and he still says he’d rather use Apple Pay 99 times out of 100.
People keep telling me it doesn’t matter, that cash is going away anyway, so why put the work in? Mostly, that’s true. Most of the time he’ll never need it. But the county fair still only takes cash for entry when the cell service cuts out, his 10-year-old sister’s lemonade stand only takes quarters, and last winter when the power went out for 12 hours, the only place open within three miles was the corner store that couldn’t run card readers. It’s not about being able to count a thousand dollars in coins in 10 seconds. It’s about not feeling stupid or stuck over something small.
We still practice once in a while when the change jar gets full. He still messes up sometimes, especially if there’s a lot of people around or he’s tired after practice. Last week he told me he helped his friend count out cash for a yearbook when the website wouldn’t take cards, and he taught his friend the sorting trick. It’s not perfect, and it’s not like he’s going to go out of his way to use loose change any time soon. But he doesn’t freeze up anymore when someone hands him a handful of quarters, and that’s enough for now.
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