Mom's Talk

Teaching our children about financial responsibility is perhaps one of the greatest responsibilities we have as parents.  As children transition into young adults, the lessons they’ve learned regarding earning, saving, and spending money during their childhood are all invaluable to a healthy financial existence.  Allowances, of course, are a first step in giving children a sense of financial responsibility.

 This week, we asked our Peachtree Corners Mom’s Forum: Do you give your children an allowance? If yes: how old were they when you started? What do they do (if anything) to earn it?  If no: why not? Do you have another system in place?

 Jamie says:

We have never given our kids an allowance on the principal that this is "just what you do in a family", but I am considering starting one for the "extra chores". For example, I would use a star chart and praise for younger kids learning to do chores consistently. On the other hand, I would never give our older kids an allowance for cleaning their rooms, making their beds every day, setting the table, loading and unloading the dishwashing and putting away their clothes, but scooping the poop in the backyard, or doing a couple of laundry loads from start to finish...now that sounds appealing to me. What I am going to do is on a rotating 2 week schedule give a job to a child, describe the parameters, assign a dollar amount high enough for them to be upset if someone else got that money and expect them to execute it without being reminded. If they choose not to do it or claim they don't have time, I will quietly ask another child to do it and take the money out of the first child's allowance. There will be an explosion among siblings and anger at me at first balking at this idea, but they will soon get the picture that they receive money for being dependable and they lose money if Mom has to "hire" someone ELSE more dependable for the job! You see, being a Mom IS fun...(evil Mom laugh)!!!

 Sonia says:

 Man, these questions have been great...really starting to get me to think about the near future. My kids are still young, 5 and 3, so we haven't really had to deal with many of these issues. On principle, I too wouldn't want to give an allowance because they need to pull their own weight in our family. And we also want to instill in them civic responsibility, like helping a neighbor with her trash can or newspaper. There was a good article in the NYT recently about this issue. However, on the flip side, we also want them to learn the value of money and hard work and saving. So, I think down the road we will have to dole out tangible monetary rewards to teach these other values/skills.

In the meantime, the m&m reward system for going potty is working out great for us!

Maureen says:

We too have discussed allowances but haven't really moved forward. My husband is adamant that allowances not be linked to chores as those are what you do as part of the family. We will likely formalize the system this summer when our younger daughter turns 7 - presumably the age of responsibility.

 Editor's note: This weekly feature is designed to solicit a dialog between our readers. We would like your feedback. What do you think about this issue? Do you give your children an allowance?