Last month, we started giving the big boys an allowance. Tristan and Simon each get $2 a week, paid each Saturday. Simon now thinks of the weekend not as a day without school, but as the day he gets paid. That didn’t take long!<\/p>\n
We debated for a bit about whether to tie the allowance to chores. I’ve seen it argued both ways: either you do, and the kids have to do their chores to get paid, or you pay the allowance out of the benevolence of your parental goodness and the chores are something that are done simply as a cost of being a member of the family. In the end, we leaned more toward the latter, but I have already threatened Tristan a few times with withholding part of his allowance if he didn’t do a better job of keeping up with his chores.<\/p>\n
At four and six, their chores are fairly simple. They are also things I am not overly fond of doing. Fancy that! Simon is responsible for putting away the cutlery after the dishwasher is run, which happens at least once a day. Tristan is responsible for giving the dog food and water twice a day. They are both responsible for putting their schoolbags in their cubbies, putting their own clothes in the laundry hamper, and cleaning up after themselves if they’ve made a particularly spectacular mess (art projects come to mind.) I’m working on getting them to clear their breakfast dishes, too. And they’re on the hook for assignment of random chores, too: bring this basket of laundry upstairs, shuck this corn (that was a fun one!), go entertain your baby brother for two minutes while mommy finishes this blog post. So far, they’ve not only endured their chores without complaint but have actually said they like their assigned tasks. I’m obviously not working them hard enough!<\/p>\n
The tricky part has been letting them spend their money on whatever they want. To me, the allowance is as much about introducing money management as it is about chores. So far, Tristan has spent the entirety of his allowance each week on Pokemon cards. Sigh. It’s his money, though, and he’s earned it, so we’ve been letting him get what he wants even though his mother is mildly offended by the idea of a universe in which Pokemon exists. <\/p>\n
Even though he’s younger, it’s Simon who seems to be more willing to save up for something for a couple of weeks. He’s got his eye on a black cat Webkinz that would cost about two months worth of allowance. We’ll see if he makes it that far. He also said he’s saving for a remote control R2D2 they saw at the retro toy store. It’s only $169. Think he’ll still want it in a year and a half?<\/p>\n
How do you work allowance and chores with your kids?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last month, we started giving the big boys an allowance. Tristan and Simon each get $2 a week, paid each Saturday. Simon now thinks of the weekend not as a day without school, but as the day he gets paid. That didn’t take long! We debated for a bit about whether to tie the allowance … Continue reading “Putting the kids on the payroll”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mothering-without-a-licence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1367\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}