Are you teaching your kids the habits of financial success? Take our quiz.

Many guides offer tips on how to raise children, but there's little research on how to teach financial success. So I did my own research: a year developing a questionnaire; four years interviewing 233 wealthy people and 128 poor people; and another 18 months writing a book, "Rich Habits: The Daily Success Habits of Wealthy Individuals." Financially successful parents pick and choose among these habits and they often emphasize the character these qualities build rather than the money they bring. While putting them into practice doesn't guarantee financial success, following a well-worn path increases your chances of getting to your destination. If you have a child 14 years or older, take our quiz to see if your success habits coincide with those taught by the well-to-do:

9. How well do you know your child's close friends and their parents?

Lucy Nicholson/Reuters/File
Dylan Burger jokes with his mother Elizabeth at the Boys & Girls Club in Santa Monica, Calif., in this file photo from December. Elizabeth Burger and her husband lost their apartment in 2009 after both losing their jobs with combined earnings of $100,000 a year, sold most of their possessions and lived in a motel before moving into Elizabeth's mother's garage last year.

Our child has so many friends that it’s impossible to know each one

Not as well as I should

We know each one of their close friends well and we also know the parents well

My child changes friends so often that I can’t keep up

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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