Teaching your kids to invest responsibly can feel like a thankless chore. Kids and their parents move and think at different speeds. What's seemingly an eternity for a teen is a blink of the eye for mom and dad. An adult facing four years of college tuition payments followed by years of living off retirement understands the importance of putting aside money early. Most kids just can't grasp that concept.

From the kids' point of view, having mom and dad lecture them on financial basics can also feel like a chore. Given how little fun it can be for both sides, the process of learning investing basics turns the prospect of spending time together as a family into yet another item on a daily to-do list.

It doesn't have to be so bad. Teaching kids to invest isn't a one-way street. Learning from your children while teaching them financial basics can actually be fun and lucrative for the whole family. Set aside the textbooks and head to the mall together to shop for investing ideas.

Rachel Fox is an actress and editor of the popular Fox On Stocks website. She's also 16 and hip, giving her an uncanny sense for what's hot and what's not among her peers. She's created a "MyGenLoves" index and describes it as, "Companies that are very hot in my generation; things my friends love."

In the attached video Fox ran through four of the companies on her list. As it turns out, some of the names will sound very familiar to the parental set.

Facebook (FB)

Analysts spend a lot of time trying to figure out how the world's biggest social network is going to "monetize" users, but the company's long-term success or failure is going to come down to its ability to keep its core customers from going elsewhere. Fox says FB is a winner in that regard but maybe not for the reasons you think.

Related: Facebook Is Still #1 for Teens, But Watch Out for Twitter! Says Analyst

"Facebook was really smart in acquiring Instagram," Fox says, describing the photo sharing company FB purchased for nearly $1 billion in 2012. "Instagram is actually the big social media thing that my generation is into right now."

Starbucks (SBUX)

Starbucks' appeal to teens is an afterthought, at most, for many investors. Conventional wisdom says teens are too young to drink coffee, preferring any of the dozens of energy drinks flooding store shelves. Fox strongly disagrees.

For decades pundits have been claiming Japan’s “zombie” economy was here to stay; nothing could be done to revive it or the moribund stock market.

Fast forward to 2013. A new government installed in Tokyo and unprecedented central bank stimulus created a nice run-up in Japanese stocks. In fact, the G-20 group of major economies over the weekend praised Japan's monetary policies as supporting domestic demand (and not as a devaluing of the currency), giving the Nikkei another 2% boost on Monday.

Wall Street hasn’t ignored these developments. Goldman Sachs recently upped their 12-month target for the benchmark Nikkei 225 (^N225), seeing a 20% gain push the index to 16,000. As U.S. stocks seesaw a bit in the early spring, investors are betting Japan could be the place to find some gains.

“I think [the yen] ultimately does get through [100 yen/dollar],” he says, “and when you look at a long term chart of the dollar/yen, it’s actually breaking a 25 to 30 year downtrend, so there are a lot reasons to think it could get much weaker versus the dollar.”