Allowances are one of the most hotly debated elements of financial education for kids. In one corner, parents advocate them, because having real money available can make it easier for children to save, spend, give to charity and learn basics like how to budget. Critics shoot them down, claiming that they essentially teach kids to expect money for nothing. If you’re in the latter group, you’ve got a handful of options you can use instead of handing money over “for free” to your children.
Option #1: Paid Chores
Many parents like using paid chores instead of a regular allowance, and it’s probably the most popular alternative. To use this system, you take child-doable tasks like folding laundry, making the bed or feeding the family pet and assign a monetary value to each one. When your kid completes one of the tasks, he earns that amount. You can either pay him as he goes, or you can use a simple chart on the refrigerator or wall to keep track of everything done and have “payday” once a week.
The benefit of this system is that your child learns that money comes from doing work. If the chores don’t get done, you don’t pay him. This is essentially how it happens for employees in the real world, so some parents assert that it’s good preparation for being responsible in a job. One down side, however, it’s not really representative of what happens for a typical adult in a home—no one is going to pay him to wash his dishes later on, for example, so you need to figure out a way to get him used to doing those things “just because” eventually.
Option #2: Earned Time
The idea that a person can earn something is an important concept for kids to grasp as they grow up. Even so, the something earned does not have to be money. If you’d rather leave dollars and cents out of the equation as you try to help your kids become responsible, one choice might be to let them earn time. If they do a particular chore, for example, you might give them an extra 15 minutes of time on the computer. They can track their time and save it up to spend later on if they like.
One good thing about this approach is that it promotes a good work-fun balance—for each task they complete, they’re guaranteed some time doing something they enjoy. It is also affordable to do even when your budget is tighter than tight. The bummer is that, because your child doesn’t get to work with real money, it can be much harder to connect it to basic financial concepts, such as taking earned money to the bank.
Option #3: Paid Rewards
If the concept of paying kids for chores ruffles your feathers a bit, you might want to try giving paid rewards instead. With this system, you provide some money to your child when you catch them in good behaviors. This could be anything from using manners at the dinner table to getting a certain grade in a class. Some parents always let their children set goals in this system so they clearly know what to do and strive for, but other parents like to reward “on the fly” so that kids don’t start thinking that the money is guaranteed.
Parents often like paid rewards because they can go well outside the scope of household chores in terms of what their children receive money for. People who criticize this method, however, say that it doesn’t always offer enough predictability in terms of how much a child can get, which can interfere with teaching concepts like budgeting. They also point out that some kids eventually interpret it as being “bought off” and that, because every child is in a different place cognitively and physically, it can be difficult to keep rewards fair among multiple children.