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.

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.

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………

“I tell you that money does not come from virtue but from virtue comes money and every other good of man.” ~ Socrates