Don’t pay your children for chores
Receiving a small allowance is important for child growth, but shouldn’t be for helping
Eighty-three per cent of parents who give their kids an allowance believe they should earn it by doing chores, according to an annual T. Rowe Price survey. Those parents are getting it wrong, if you believe a pile of parenting books going back a couple of decades that say an allowance should be for learning — not for earning.
For a recent one, Ron Lieber’s The Opposite of Spoiled argues that we shouldn’t give allowances in exchange for chores because one day our kids will decide they don’t need the money and will refuse to do the work. “So allowance ought to stand on its own, not as a wage but as a teaching tool,” Lieber writes. So does this mean our kids shouldn’t do routine chores? No. It just means that they shouldn’t get paid for them.
These parenting experts — and more — argue that children should help out around the house because it’s the right thing to do, not because they make money at it. Many suggest that if you want to pay your children to do extra work around the house — your own work — that’s perfectly fine.
The T. Rowe Price survey also found that 34 per cent of parents don’t give their children an allowance at all, and these experts would say that’s another mistake. After all, to learn to ride a bike, you need a bike. And to learn to manage money, you need money. Even in households where money is tight, parents can move a little bit of the money they spend on their children into an allowance for the children to spend on themselves.
So that’s the “why” of allowance. But what about the when, where, how, how much and how often? When In the T. Rowe Price survey, 20 per cent of parents who give an allowance started it when their kids were 6; that was followed by ages 7 and 8, each with 19 per cent. So there is no one “right” age.
The consensus among experts is that you should give your child an allowance as soon as he or she begins noticing and asking about money. How often Once you start an allowance, how often do you dole it out? The majority of parents give their children this money on a weekly basis, and the experts say that’s fine for little kids. However, for teenagers, some suggest a larger, monthly allowance to give them practice making their funds stretch over time. How, where Similarly, you could change your method of payment as your kids grow up. For example, kids in the single digits are learning to count and like visual and tactile stimulation, so giving them cash and coins is a learning experience.
You may be able to reach screen-obsessed tweens by giving them their money via various apps that allow you to deposit money and allow them to group that money into virtual jars, instead of real jars. For older teens, money and parenting experts suggest a bank account with a debit card to give them practice for the real world that’s just around the corner. How much There’s one final, fraught category to tackle: how much. Eden Burgess easily deals with multimillion-dollar paintings in her role as an art and antiquities lawyer for Cultural Heritage Partners, but when it came to negotiating her growing daughter’s allowance, she needed help. “I asked some parent friends who said that a good rule of thumb is half the child’s age,” Burgess said. “So we started at $4 per week when my daughter was 8.”
Burgess chose to give her daughter half her age; others say to pay kids their full age. There are advantages to using an age-based formula when your kids are young: It avoids arguments about the initial amount, provides a methodology for raises and justifies different amounts given to older and younger siblings.