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I recently received this email on kid’s allowances from a reader named Paula:
Hey Ron, I love your blog! Thanks so much for what you write. I get alot out of it every day. I wanted to get your advice on my biggest daily problem–my kids allowance. I give each of my 2 kids $5 every two weeks when my husband gets paid. The problem is that my kids claim their friends get anywhere from $10 a week to $25 a week. They feel they are “underpaid,” and I’m not sure how to respond. The “if all your friends jumped off a bridge” line of reasoning isn’t working anymore. My kids are 10 and 12 years old btw. Any ideas? Thanks!
Thanks for writing Paula, disparity in allowances is a common and sometimes difficult problem to handle. Our kids are great negotiators aren’t they? I don’t know about you, but I think my 8 year old son, in less than an hour, could have negotiated peace between The US and Japan back during World War II.
Other parents who set no limits on their children do sometimes cause problems for those of us living within a budget and who are teaching our kids to budget their allowance. Those other children show up at the mall with credit cards or wads of cash while your children (and mine) have a limited amount of cash only or at least a budget on what they can spend. When we went to watch The University of Alabama Crimson Tide whip the Hogs of Arkansas on the football field (49-14), I gave each of my three children $10 in ones. I told them they could spend their $10 on whatever they wanted, food, sodas, souvenirs, or whatever, but that when it was gone, it was gone. Don’t come to me asking for more money. They learned the economic principle of “scarcity of resources” pretty fast! An no, we didn’t cave in when they asked for more.
Your solution will involve a sequence of steps:
Unless you’re the richest man or woman on earth, there will always be someone else with more money and/or with less discipline. This is an opportunity to help your children become wise in the ways they view their financial position at a particular moment in time. Jealousy and covetousness are not traits you want them to cultivate. What you want them to cultivate is a spirit of contentment within their own little selves.
You and your husband will have a different set of values from your children’s friend’s parents and those values will be reflected in the way you spend money. Just because someone else has different values, doesn’t make yours wrong or theirs right. That is precisely why it is vitally important that you remain firm in your decisions. Spending just because another person does it is never wise.
Working through this problem will be a wonderful teaching opportunity for you and your children. Don’t overlook the opportunity by caving in to their pressure.
Technorati Tags: allowance, kids, children, budget, negotiations, money, negotiate, parenting
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Our boys had to work to receive payment.
Letting the dog out, cleaning the basement, doing the yard, getting good grades, helping their Dad, or helping me…
And they had a good life.
It’s easier to give an allowance though. Just so as not to keep up with their responsibilities.
But they earned what’s commonly called a pay check. None of this allowance stuff.
THEY, called it an allowance though, just to keep themselves in line with the rest of their schoolmates.
But I still can’t stand the sound of that word, and now we have grandchildren.
hummmm………
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I’m not a mother (yet), but I was brought up in a household that never seemed to have enough: enough money, enough clothing, enough on our plates. We made it as best we could on a soldier’s salary with five kids. We five kids put in time doing chores to help our ailing mother (she was diagnosed with many diseases in my early childhood, one of them being Lupus), to keep the house clean, and to teach us a sense of responsibility for our domiciles.
We weren’t paid a cent to do this. We did it because we lived there, because we slept there, because we ate there. We did it because it was our home.
There were arguments over who had to scoop the kitty box; there was insistent “But I DID that already!” when something was missed with the vacuum. I’m sure we caused our parents quite a few headaches with our whining. Money would not have changed how we felt about chores, regardless of how little or how much we earned. In fact, if we had felt that we DESERVED to be paid to keep the place we lived clean, I imagine there would have been a lot more whining involved.
Here’s the upside: when we needed clothing for school, we had the money enough to choose what we wanted to wear (within reason, of course - I never had an Abercrombie anything like my schoolmates). When I wanted to see a movie with a pal, my mother didn’t even blink when she handed over a $10 bill. When I needed bus fare to go downtown for an event, it was given freely.
My mother never kept track of how much she gave us or whether she was on par with other parents. Us children never found a reason to say, “But MOM, Billy Smith down the street gets $XYZ EVERY MONDAY. Why can’t we have $XYZ every Monday?” because when we asked for something once in a blue moon, my mother happily opened her wallet and gave it to us.
What did we learn? No one DESERVES money for keeping their area clean. It’s a privilege to have a nice home and live with good people. Money DOES NOT grow on trees, and it must be earned not only through deed, but through good will and manners. We learned that we didn’t NEED everything that everyone else had; we NEEDED to be happy, but a brand-name anything wasn’t going to give us happiness.
Bottom line? Don’t pay your kids to do their chores. Don’t give them money on an every-week or every-two-week basis, because then they’ll start to feel entitled to that. Reward them for their good deeds; punish them for their bad deeds. Teach them respect, honesty, and self-worth before pushing cash at them. You’ll have good kids in the end, I promise, regardless of the lack of allowance.
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I am glad to see that someone young has the same ideas as this grandma!
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In junior high, we started getting $50/month. However, along with that went far great responsibility: buy my own clothes, school supplies, extra beauty supplies (Mom bought plain old cheap shampoo, I bought the fancy schmancy stuff), charity, gifts, summer camp, etc. I kept track of every penny I spent and each year was able to negotiate an increase in my allowance (I think it went all the way up to $75/mo by the time I went away to college).
My point being: If you decide it makes sense to give a larger allowance, you might tie it to larger responsibilities for spending the money.
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