Day: March 22, 2008

We’ve always given our kids allowance money. I feel that teaching my kids to handle money is a crucial part of my responsibility as a parent. They can’t learn to handle money if they never have any. Some families choose to link allowances to chores around the house. I have always resisted doing this. I felt that it was better for the chores to be just a requirement of being in our family and the allowances to be a benefit for being in our family. This seemed right and fair to me. It is possible that this seemed fair because for years I got the benefit of being dependent upon Howard’s comfortable Novell income.

I’ve recently changed my opinion on allowances. In the past two years I’ve had to work hard to help the money come in. The workload has steadily increased for me as I picked up new tasks; accounting, shipping, book layout, etc. It frustrates me to see the house become a disaster while the kids don’t care enough to help. These same kids would rather wait a few extra weeks for money to arrive than do chores to earn the money. I’m doing too much and it would really help if the kids would just pick up their toys once in awhile. Howard has long been of the opinion that kids who don’t work should not get allowance, but since I was the one running the allowance system, he did not argue about the way we’ve been doing it.

So I have now shifted camps. Yesterday I announced to the kids that they’d received their last free allowance. From now on they must work if they want to get paid. They must also mark the chart to keep track of when they worked or else they won’t get paid. The kids took the news with hardly a comment. I expect there will be moaning and groaning some time in the future. Maybe this will get me more help around the house, which I desperately need. If not, then at least I’ll get to keep more of the family’s hard earned money instead of watching it get spent on candy and dollar store toys.