If You Won the Lottery, How Would You Spoil Your Kids?

When your kid sidles up to you one day, asking why their friend got to go on a Disney cruise, or why their friend got the newest game console, it can be difficult to let them down, to make them aware of the financial realities facing your family. Every dad wants to be the best dad possible, but money constraints can be hard to understand for a kid, who only wants what he or she feels is the fun childhood everyone else is having. That’s why it’s fun to fantasize about winning the lottery. It’s a pretty common dream: someone pulling up to your house with a dump truck full of cash and dropping it on your driveway (incidentally, it doesn’t exactly work like that).

So, why not play the lottery? Finding out how to buy Powerball tickets in Canada these days is a cinch, and using your kids’ birthdays as lottery numbers adds a family element to playing. Buying a ticket each draw doesn’t cost all that much, either – the price of a second cup of coffee – and it allows you to keep the dream alive. Also, short of winning the big jackpot, there are a great deal of smaller prizes that could easily bankroll a family vacation or a game console. If you treat playing the Powerball as a fun diversion, then any resulting win, however large or small, is an amazing opportunity to spoil your kids.

Which begs the question: how would you do it? How would you spoil your kids if you won a Powerball prize? Well, there are a number of ways to spoil your kids that are actually productive, and that can help you form a closer bond with them. Pay attention to their hobbies and interests. If they’re really into cars this year, you could buy a “project” car for the two of you to work on together – it doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to fix up a car, because the two of you can learn together.

Maybe your kid is a dinosaur nut (a lot of kids go through that phase!). Get them a season pass to the museum, or even plan a road trip to Drumheller to get a firsthand glimpse of real dinosaur bones. Gifts like that serve three distinct purposes: 1) they’re a ton of fun for the kid, 2) they’re educational, and 3) they loop you, Dad, into your kid’s interests, forming an even stronger bond. If you play the Powerball lottery on the regular, as many people do, start a little piggy bank (or e-piggy bank) for those smaller prizes you win – you might surprise yourself, after a while, with how much is in there.

Then there’s the big jackpot, routinely in the hundreds of millions of dollars. With that, you could do just about anything: send your kids to the best schools, take trips to exotic locales and expose them to other cultures, make sure every evening’s dinner is delicious and nutritious, and set them up with a college fund that will ensure that, wherever in the world they want to study, they’ll have the opportunity. Money can’t replace the love of a dad, but it can certainly open up opportunities to express that love.