One thing that can help is to realize that mathematics is a world of
its own that can be used to MODEL things in the real world, but, like
any model, is not IDENTICAL to that real world. Negative numbers are
part of the "model world", not the real world. So there are some
situations where negative numbers make sense (and a negative answer
to a problem is valid), and others where they do not (so that a
negative answer just means there is no solution to the original
problem). In the case of temperatures, the 0 point (except in
absolute temperature) is arbitrary, so that SOME negative values are
possible, but others are not.
In the case of money, a negative answer may or may not be valid. If
you are just spending money from a basic checking account, a negative
balance means that you are overdrawn--but it DOES still have meaning,
because you now owe that much money to the bank. If you have an
account with automatic overdraft protection, the negative balance
means that you have borrowed that much and have to pay it back. So
how to interpret the negative result depends on the situation; often
positive and negative are just two sides of the same coin, each with
its own interpretation.
The idea of negative numbers was often considered suspect even into
the 1800's. I've read a book by a mathematician of that time trying
to present algebra in a way that didn't treat negative numbers as
real; he called them fictitious, and presented them as just a
shorthand for operations that should properly be done in reverse. But
he admitted that using negative numbers made the work easier,
always gave the right answer (when interpreted correctly), and
unified what would otherwise have required several cases (depending
on which number is greater, for example). That is, negative numbers
serve as a good, though imperfect, MODEL--you don't have to recognize
the existence of the negative numbers themselves as concrete entities
in order to make good use of them. (And, by the way, even counting
numbers are really an abstract concept too--you never saw a "three"
by itself, did you? ALL numbers live in the math world, not the real
one.)
What we are doing when we use negative numbers is translating a real
problem into a problem about, say, locations on a number line (which
correspond to amounts of money you have or owe, say), solving that
new problem, and then deciding how to translate the answer back into
the real world problem. The negative numbers live in this separate
world of math, and may have various meanings or lack of meaning in
the real world.