Why can't a country just print more money and hand it out, so that everybody has enough? It sounds like an obvious fix to poverty, and most adults cannot explain what is actually wrong with it.

This family-friendly show for kids answers it without economics jargon. It is about the difference between money and the things money is for. Money is a promise that you get a turn at something real: an apple, a seat, a place on a team, a house. Promises can be printed in an afternoon. The real things take a season, or a year, or a decade. Two kids work that gap out for themselves, testing it against places they already know and arguing with their dad about whether it is fair, and end up with the question worth asking any time someone says more money will fix a problem. Is there more stuff? And if there is not, how long would it take to make some? It closes with a country that printed anyway, and what its money was worth by the end.

Best for ages 7 to 12.

Passports explained for kids: what a passport actually is, why every country issues its own, and why officers at the border ask the questions they ask. Raina (age 10) and Devin (age 8) find out what is printed inside a passport, why only your own country's government can issue you one, why even a baby traveling on a parent's lap needs one, and why there is no single passport for the whole planet.

Then they take on passport control itself: why a country wants to know where you are staying and how long you plan to be there, how those questions differ from the ones you get coming home, why fruit, plants and soil cannot cross a border while a souvenir rock can, and what the face-scanning machines at the airport are comparing your face to. A kid-friendly guide to passports, citizenship, borders and customs, recorded after the family's trip to Costa Rica.

In this episode of The Junior Boardroom, the kids take a trip around the globe, touring eight currencies tied to their own classmates' home countries: the US dollar, Japanese yen, Brazilian real, South Korean won, the euro, Indian rupee, Turkish lira, British pound, and the Costa Rican colón. They crack the secret that a big number on a price tag doesn't mean something is expensive (that same Pokémon pack costs about four dollars almost everywhere, once you do the exchange-rate math), and find out why France has no "French dollar."

With the family's August trip to Costa Rica weeks away, it's live math on air: converting colones, won, and pounds in their heads, plus how a kid's debit card does the currency conversion automatically the moment you travel. A warm, kid-friendly guide to currencies, exchange rates, and money around the world.