Tag Archives: allowance

Should You Pay for Chores?

Parenting experts disagree vehemently on the issue of whether or not children should be paid for chores. Each side strongly believes that they are right, quoting studies and analysis that support their position. With such a polarized debate on the issue, what should parents think? How can they determine whether or not to pay their children for chores or to offer an allowance outright that requires no work conditions on the child’s part? Let us take a look at both sides of the issue. On the one hand, paying a child for chores rather than giving a free and clear … Continue reading →

Housework- Who’s Responsible?

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Chores. What a fun word, all you have to do is say it out loud and everyone scatters. When I was growing up I was the oldest of five children, there were lots of chores to go around and I did my fair share. Boy did I resent it! All that cooking and cleaning and laundry and babysitting, sucked the life right out of being a teenager. Or at least I thought so at the time. I decided that when I had children they would never do chores. My kids would not be responsible for housework, I figured, as the … Continue reading →

Toddlers and Chores

Keeping a clean house is a lesson parents try to teach their children when the kids are young. My mom and dad did what they could to instill in me a respect for a clean and uncluttered area. Having a clean and organized house can make for a more peaceful and less anxious home environment. I have a toddler who needs to learn about putting things away when she’s done with them. She is a great helper when it’s time to put things away at Gymboree. She’ll even help her friends put their things away. Yet this same two-year-old looks … Continue reading →

Do You Give Your Preschooler An Allowance?

When my grandfather was ill, I wrote him letters. He was always the master of business finance, since he owned his own business for more than half a century. In my last letter to him, I mentioned that I had just instituted an allowance for my two and a half year old. I thought that he would enjoy the fact that I was teaching financial management to my child. My mother read the letter to him and she cracked up when it came to the sentence about the allowance. Yes, she gave me an allowance when I was growing up … Continue reading →

“Mom, I Need Money!”

What parent hasn’t heard that phrase a billion times? Or at least some version of the “Will you give me?” or “How can I earn?” or just “Do you have any money?” While I have gotten pretty numb to it, there are times when it can grate on my last nerve. The thing is, my kids are quite old enough to earn their own money and they did all three get quite a bit of money from different sources for the holidays. However, all three of them have different levels of money-management skills and different personalities when it comes to … Continue reading →

Giving Surprise Money

There was a window of time when my kids were younger that I did a pretty decent job of keeping up on the “allowance”–we did not do a set amount each week, but I paid my kids by the month for chores done. We had a “menu” of jobs that needed to be done and the salary that was paid for each job. They could then do the work, keep track of it on an invoice, and I would pay them on my pay days. This worked rather well for a couple years. As they got older, and with two … Continue reading →

Rite of Passage: My Son Opened His Own Savings Account

My son has been vigilantly saving most of his weekly allowance. When he announced that he wanted to open a savings account once he reached $100.00 I was pleased. So this morning we got up bright and early and headed to Chase (after a stop for breakfast at IHOP) with a whopping $123.00 as his initial deposit. You have to know Tyler to understand why saving more than five bucks is worthy of the highest accolade. In the past, as soon as he received any amount of money he wanted to spend it. And I let him. But I realized … Continue reading →

Should Kids Help With Their Own Living Expenses?

Some friends and I were talking recently about how different we thought things were for us when we were growing up. One friend confessed that while she had gone to a private, parochial school, she had to help pay for her own tuition when it became too expensive. Her parents said that she could go to public school, but if she stayed in the private school, she was going to have to contribute to the tuition from her own earnings. As for myself, I know that I had to pay for my own gas, oil, and car repairs once I … Continue reading →

What Can We Call Them Besides “Chores”?

I am not terribly fond of the word “chores”–it seems to carry with it generations of unsavory connections and just generally sounds un-fun. Maybe, as a family, we can come up with another word for “chores” that will not only sound better, but make it so that family members are more interested and excited to help out around the house? How about something like “helps” or “contributions”? Those both sound pretty positive. Actually we add that word to contributions and come up with “positive contributions”–that sounds very chipper and perky indeed. How could a child argue with “Have you made … Continue reading →

Kids and Their Money

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While flying to Tampa, Florida for a quick Spring Training Baseball and beach getaway last month, I found myself mindlessly flipping through the Skymall catalog in the seat-back pocket in front of me. If you have never seen this in-flight catalog, it is kind of like a regular mall on the pages of a magazine you read in the sky (hence the name). The color pages are filled with hundreds of products, from dog beds to language course programs, elaborate outdoor water fountains to an escape ladder for use during a house fire (which I always joke about buying, even … Continue reading →