You’ve decided to give your child an allowance, but can’t decide how much to give them. You head over to your new online parenting specialist, Google, and find the following suggestions:
- $0.50 per Year of Age
- $1.00 per Year of Age
- $100 for the Year, Up Front
- Let your child suggest what they need
- Use a percentage of your own budget
- Use a Fancy Web Calculator
At this point, your head is spinning. “Just give me a number!”, you scream at your monitor. Well, good news — I have a number for you:
Zero.
Zilch.
Nada.
Nothin’.
Advice columns are riddled with calculations and number galore, all based on folktales, “common cents sense”, and speculation from well-meaning experts in the field trying to provide easy answers. “But Josh“, you declare loudly in your head, “$0.00 seems like a pretty easy answer to me!”
Well, not so fast…
The Case for the $0.00 Allowance
Giving an allowance is easy. Not giving one is hard. Other parents may give you disapproving looks. Your child’s friends may taunt them, waving their dollar bills in your child’s face. I suggest, however, that if we go back and examine the reasons behind our choice of what dollar amount to select, “zero” answers the call better than any other number. Let’s take a look:
I want to introduce my child to the concept of Money
Your child enters the world with everything handed to them: food, clothes, shelter, toys. At some point, as they grow older, you want to teach them about money. At the same time, you don’t want to throw your 5-year-old out on the street to suddenly fend for themselves. So you decide on an allowance to teach them about money and, more to the point, about budgeting. Yes, budgeting. That’s really what you want to teach them about. Not money, but the concept of limited resources.
We want our children to start grasping this idea that although we might want an infinite number of things, only a finite number exist. And yet, our solution is to provide an infinite supply of money, spaced out over time. We’re sending an implicit message that, no matter what, dollars will magically appear in your wallet each week.
Does your job send you a paycheck whether you show up or not?
(If the answer is yes, please forward me an application ASAP).
What’s more, most parents are already providing unconditional base support for their children, meaning that this allowance is not spent by your child for food, clothing, or shelter. So the allowance is really limited to the “extras” in life: the fun things that we only get once we take care of our basic needs. The real message most parents want to teach is this idea of limiting ourselves — of appreciating that we need to go above and beyond in order to obtain those “extras.”
I heard experts say that we shouldn’t pay kids to do chores
I agree with those experts, and what I am advocating here is not a “pay for chores” system. Chores are a basic part of the family ecosystem, and those experts rightly point to a need for children to understand that there are certain things we do in life when we are part of a group. When it comes to chores, there are other consequences that “fit the crime” when a child doesn’t participate, but that’s a topic for another article.
What we’re talking about here is, in a sense, micro-employment. What I advocate for parents is to prepare lists of additional work around the house that needs doing based on your child’s current abilities.For toddlers, perhaps they “help” dad cook dinner (if that’s not part of the “normal” routine). For teenagers, perhaps a few household repairs or property care (e.g., mowing the lawn) that you would otherwise do yourself or even hire someone to do for you. You can even make a list of your own chores, and offer to pay a small fee if they do it for you while you’re at work.
In addition, encourage older kids to look outside the home for work. Mowing lawns, lemonade stands, and babysitting are just a few common examples.
What about teaching them to save?
This is also an important skill, but I again suggest that saving earned money is far more meaningful than saving money you “just know” will show up on your desk. True, both help teach kids to understand the difference between getting something now or getting it later, but there is an emotional connection to earned money that will greatly enhance the saving process.
One suggestion I give parents is to either open an interest-bearing savings account for their child (this also helps them build credit and develop healthy “card use”) or help them save for themselves in a piggybank or safe at home. You might even want to exaggerate the concept of interest to help highlight the savings (“I’ll give you 10% each weekend on whatever you have saved up.”).
The Bottom Line
Regardless of what you choose, the most important, overarching principle in all of this is consistency. Whether you choose to simply provide an allowance or go for the “work only” method, the real teaching comes when your child runs out of cash. They will come to you, pleading for help, and the hardest part of being a parent is typically saying “no.”
Be kind, but be firm: let them know you understand how sad it is that they cannot afford the new toy or tasty treat, then remind them of how they can look forward to getting it once their next paycheck comes in. It’s a lesson we could all use from time to time.