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Tying Allowance to Chores Could Kill Kids’ Motivation to Help Out
- bwb 8y agoI had a huge series of fights when I was 13 with my mom/stepdad, as I told them I wasn't doing the chores as they didn't pay enough versus money I was making online. If you pay someone for chores it becomes less about their contribution to the family, and more something you pay someone for... which I think in hindsight was a huge mistake on their part. Chores should be part of being in the family. Money should be tied to something else I think.
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- JustSomeNobody 8y agoI'm confused. Did you do any chores at all? If not, did you pay someone to do your laundry, cooking, etc?
- bwb 8y agoChores at my house were not laundry or cooking, they were things like putting dirty dishes up, putting them in, clearing the table, taking out the trash, stuff like that.
- mturmon 8y agoMy family decoupled chores from money as you suggest. The rationale is that chores are part of living in the household, and are not negotiable. My kid gets a paid allowance which is in principle tied to her “job” which is going to school. It seemed inconsistent to say, “you are paid $x for this list of chores, which are in fact compulsory.” Because I didn’t want to allow her to opt out of, say, emptying the dishwasher because it wasn’t a good enough deal. Fundamentally, I didn’t want to broker a market in chores.
- m0zg 8y ago>> chores are part of living in the household, and are not negotiable Sure they are "negotiable". Your kid could just refuse to do them. What are parents going to do, kick him/her out?
- bwb 8y agoThe problem is when you tie them to money it implies you stop doing them and you don't get money. Whereas it should be you don't do them and you are not part of the family, and lose the right to your bed and stuff.
- m0zg 8y agoSure, as a parent myself I understand what the problem is. I was just challenging the notion that that parents have any leverage in this negotiation anymore.
- mturmon 8y agoIt is not a negotiation. We have tried to frame it as a question of ethical behavior. The kid wants to preserve the notion of a just household, and sees the logic of doing her part, provided the “ask” is equitable.
- m0zg 8y agoI suspect you're not a parent. "The kid" mostly just wants to lie on the couch, avoid doing homework, and watch youtube all day.
- titusjohnson 8y agoSo did you end up paying rent then? Edit: I can expound some. That's what would have been said to me if I responded in that way. Anyone living at home and not doing chores would pay rent. Mom and Dad did, so can anyone else bringing in money. Growing up, chores were not tied to allowance. We got $5 a week for spending cash, any extra we earned was our own, but chores were just chores. It's how you helped out at home. If you didn't want to do chores, the response was "Here's the classifieds, find an apartment." Now, my parents wouldn't have kicked a 12 year old out for announcing they wouldn't do chores, but A) the realization of how much money one would need to survive on their own is a hell of a shocker, and B) there are much better ways to apply pressure to get someone back on board with being helpful.
- paganel 8y ago> Children naturally want to help at a very early age As a kid I didn't "want to help" at any age, let alone "naturally", and nevertheless I turned out to be a relatively well functioning adult when it comes to keeping my current house in order. What's with this mantra of "we need to make our children slaves in order to..."? I don't know what the ends are, to be honest. Feels quite alienating. Anyway, I will be forever grateful to my parents for letting me spend my childhood playing and reading the books that I wanted instead of doing menial work.
- rpedela 8y agoNo one is trying to make their children slaves.
- kikoreis 8y agoAre you sure you know you didn't? I don't remember wanting to help either but with 3 toddlers of my own I realize there is an innate desire to participate in household tasks in every one of then. I should ask my mom.
- paganel 8y ago> Are you sure you know you didn't? I'm pretty sure, yeah. Granted, I come from a relatively less developed country where my parents were the first generation which had gone to university and they were also the first generation in my family tree who got to live in the city. As such, they had known first-hand what manual work really was, they saw and understood that it wasn't anything glamorous and as such I in turn understand why they didn't want to put me to work, too.
- codingdave 8y agoWe have a blended approach to chores and allowances. Some chores must be done, for no special compensation - laundry, dishes, and such things that are the basic level of a clean and sanitary home. Likewise, we have a base allowance they get no matter what. If they want more then the minimum money, they have to do more than the minimum chores. Also, we don't need apps for this - I have a chore list on the wall, and a physical counter they can click for each chore. At the end of the week, I put their 'clicks' in a google spreadsheet, and it tracks what we owe them. Sometimes we'll pay out in cash, but just as often, that sheet acts like a bank account and they can get cash from us on-demand up to what we owe.
- rayiner 8y agoAmerican parents need to discipline their damn kids. Paying for chores? Completely nuts. Look how Asians raise their kids. That’s how Korea and Japan went from third world countries to rich ones in a couple of generations.
- icebraining 8y agoYou know, "they went from poor to rich really quickly" also means "they were poor for longer". Were they paying their kids for chores before?
- mruts 8y agoMaybe I’m being naive or self-centered, but why should kids have to do chores? It’s not like they have any choice in their existence. Unless it’s an agreement made by both parties, you probably shouldn’t make your kids to chores. My parents offered me a contract when I was young to do chores in exchange for money but I always refused because I didn’t want/need the money and really didn’t want to do chores. And I turned out just fine (relatively I guess).
- maxxxxx 8y agoMy parents had 4 kids and didn't have much money. It simply would have been impossible without the kids helping. Chores weren't optional but sheer necessity.
- sandworm101 8y agoMy chore was always to study. Doing well in school is more important than some list of daily assigned tasks. That said, I couldnt sit and watch tv while dad was cutting the lawn on a saturday morning.
- Arainach 8y agoLearning to do things that you don't want to but that have to get done is perhaps the most important life skill there is.
- lgunsch 8y agoChores are a normal part of a functioning household, in the sense that if chores aren't done, or they are each done individually, then it isn't a household anymore. Each person could cook there own meal, and each person wash any dishes they want to use, but that wouldn't be very effective for anybody. Especially children, who can't do much for themselves.
- adrusi 8y agoThis problem comes up in contractarian ethics: our laws are justified by a social contract between individuals and the state, but none of us actually signed the contract execept (liberally interpreted) for immigrants. Why should we accept being bound by these laws? Similarly to how an individual has no choice of being born into a society, a child has no choice of being born into a family. One common response to the problem in contractarian ethics is that we implicitly sign the social contract by accepting it's benefits. We benefit from not living amidst anarchic chaos, and we benefit from the services provided by the state (roads, schools, etc.) That might be an unsatisfying response (we wouldn't accept that kind of reasoning in tort law) but we're going to need to have some kind of response or else we'll just be left with anarchy and everyone will be worse off. You can sheild your child from the fact that bring alive entails responsibilities outside yourself, but you'll inevitably be creating a leaky abstraction because reality just doesn't work that way.
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- epx 8y agoMy mother seized that opportunity on me, I even fried eggs since forever. Had to teach my wife how to keep the yellow part soft :D
- thelasthuman 8y agoA runny yolk is divine. May you share many eggs with your loved ones.
- m0zg 8y agoYep. Word to the wise: don't tie a reward to completing homework or earning good grades either. Demands for reward will increase over time and no homework will be done without "sufficient" reward, which always drifts upwards.
- patagonia 8y agoIn my opinion adults are just kids without adult supervision. Bedtime. Diet. Reading vs television. Just kids with no one to keep them in line. I think there is something to extrapolate from this article to work. I was recently given a retention bonus. Because I’ve been expressing a disappointment in the type of tasking I’m getting as compared to the job description I was hired for and the needs of the company. Rather than address that they’ve chosen to bump my “allowance”. Honestly it backfired.
- freedomben 8y agoMaybe you have already, since it sounds like you've communicated your feelings, but if you haven't yet I'd specifically talk about when you'll be able to work the job description they hired you for. Might be worth sticking it out in the short term. I've seen people leave just a little too early many times and it's a shame.
- patagonia 8y agoAgreed, I insisted we finally talk timelines about 0.75 years ago, or just call it a bad fit no hard feelings. Expectations were set that were not followed through with on the company’s side, and so we had an additional series of escalating conversations. I have finally, about 2 months ago and 1.75 years after starting, been transitioned into tasking more in line with my hiring job description. However the technology our team manager has transitioned our team to during that time is a deal breaker for me. He has almost completed removing all Python code from our code base / tech stack (from what I can tell, because he doesn’t want to learn Python this late in his career despite it being the lingua fanca of data teams), has taken over and basically killed the version control set-up me and another (now ex) team member set up, and has us using a GUI based ETL software that basically no one in my job market is using, CloverETL (now CloverDX). With that as my recent experience it’s been difficult to find a new gig, so it’s back to nights and weekends refreshing my resume / skill set. It was all a lesson in how to professionally draw a line as to what I will do for a company. Lesson learned.
- paulcole 8y agoWhen I was 13 (around the year 2000), my parents forced me to do yard work/chores for our neighbor who paid me $2/hour. Taught me nothing but to hate working.
- afarrell 8y agoOne thing that helps people's motivation is being willing to explain to them why a task should be done. As a teenager, I was very reluctant to mow the lawn for years when the reason was "I told you so". I just didn't know what the benefit of mowing a lawn was and I didn't know how to persuade my parents to explain why they wanted the lawn regularly mowed. But when my dad suggested we could avoid basement flooding by digging a drainage ditch, I was keen. This wasn't a particularly easy job -- it involved going through a really annoying mix of clay and gravel and for one section digging while I was hunched over underneath our back deck. But I was eager to do it because I could imagine how my effort was actually helping my family.
- jandrese 8y agoFWIW a mowed lawn discourages rodents from making homes next to your house, and eventually chewing through whatever they can find to make a hole into your house. Of course people ruin this protection by then planting bushes right up next to their homes. The idea is to create a sort of dead zone around your house where nothing really lives. Ants of course don't care and are a huge problem for homeowners.
- protonfish 8y agoThen wouldn't gravel or paving around the house make even more sense? Lawns are stupid.
- jandrese 8y agoPaving is too ugly. Gravel pits are popular in areas that don't have enough rainfall to sustain grass. The big tradeoff with gravel pits is that they're not as nice for the kids to play on.
- sys_64738 8y agoLawns consume water runoff as grass uses water to help with growth. Gravel pits outside your house less so. Paving means water runoff has nowhere to go so you need to build that into any paving plan or your basement will flood.
- ChrisSD 8y agoIt's a long time since I did any psych but I seem to remember random rewards are effective in motivating people. For example, every few weeks give the kid a chance of a bonus allowance if all chores have been done. Of course you don't tell the <strike>victim</strike> child this is random. Let their advanced, over eager pattern matching algorithms draw their own conclusions.
- cosmie 8y agoIntermittent/Variable ratio reinforcement[1]. I use a form of it in my house, to good effect. Consistent positive behavior (with schoolwork, chores, etc) gets intermittently rewarded. Negative behavior resets any potential reward. But it's all implicit, with no attempt to threaten or coerce using rewards. The only exception being if they've already been told of a reward but significant negative behavior occurs before receiving the reward, in which case I explain why the reward was being rescinded. But there's no attempt to coerce them to stop the negative behavior by dangling the impending reward, because by the time I tell them that then it's a fact I hold firm to and not just an option/possibility. It's just something I started doing without realizing it, and my daughter picked up on. When my girlfriend and her kids moved in, they didn't pick up on it as naturally as my daughter did. But at some point my daughter told them how I worked. And once she did, it became really effective for them too, and the attempts to barter with me when I'd ask them to do things like clearing the table slowly ended. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement
- tomohawk 8y agoInstead of an allowance, seed a fund and teach your child to manage the money as it is theirs. They will learn how to balance a check book. How to invest. How to work and save for what they want. If they squander the money, they learn the consequences of that in a safe environment. A friend of mine's family did this with their kids, and they all became entrepreneurial. Everyone had chores, and chores are what you did to help the family.
- baconomatic 8y agoCould you expand on this more? Particularly around “seed a fund.”
- tomohawk 8y agoPut money into a checking account and have the child manage it. Any deposits from you need to be far enough apart to be a stretch for your child to manage. You want to get to quarterly or longer periods. Think of it like a bonus plan. They're part of the family and contributing in non-financial ways, so they get a share of the wealth. This teaches valuable skills. I can't tell you how many people showed up at college with no idea of how to manage a bank account. If they have money in their account, they can spend it on what they want, but they should be required to spend a portion of it on charitable things. Having money comes with responsibilities. If they run out, they need to figure something out. Later, introduce the child to the concept of investing by showing how you can earn money in stocks, bonds, funds, etc. Also, money they earn goes into the account. My friend bought a used car and fixed it up when he was 15 based on the money he earned from work he did for neighbors and investing in the stock market. His dad was an engineer who flipped houses before it was fashionable. If the kids wanted a job, he always had one that paid.
- makmanalp 8y agoThis reminds me of an experiment where they had a babysitting company fine parents for being late to pick up their kids. The reaction was that parents would be late more often, because they felt they'd "paid" the price. It's not quite the same but there is an overarching theme around the idea that once we think of something as a monetary transaction, we behave differently.
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- exabrial 8y agoI got to eat; that was my allowance. I'm not even joking when I say dinner was not available until chores were done. And you still had to be present at the table for family dinner. It was incredibly motivating, but looking back, my parents managed to raise 5 kids and barely broke the poverty line for combined income. Chores weren't really that bad, I had to mow the lawn once a week and unload the dishwasher one day per week, plus assistanance on home maintenance. Any money we made as kids came from jobs. I mowed a lot of lawns, helped a bunch of farmers, built fences, painted houses, fixed things until I could work at a restaurant at 16.
- andrei_says_ 8y ago“Could?” It absolutely does, and will. There’s much research on rewards and long term motivation. See Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards and it’s 30+ pages of references including experiment descriptions. Humans are not rats and birds, children are not pets to train, despite common parenting practices and school systems based on punishment and rewards. Basically if you want a child to stop enjoying something, reward them for doing it (praise is also reward). Trains them to devalue the thing, to focus on the reward, and to stop doing the thing without a reward. Similarly with punishment constant policing becomes necessary and the child stops being honest. The human brain is designed to optimize for success.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y agoGrowing up my stepdad would pay me allowance for chores. At one point I accumulated a lot of backowed money to the point where he just gave up and did not pay what he owed me. Frankly, I would have done the chores for free and it was not my idea, but the sole act of not paying what was owed made me resent him for a long time. Don’t make promises you can’t keep.
- thelasthuman 8y agoMaybe he was training you for the real world, where everyone does their best to externalize costs and internalize profits? Probably not though, sorry you went through that.
- wildermuthn 8y agoI’m struck at how often American culture needs scientific evidence to prove common sense, in this case: intrinsic rewards work better than extrinsic rewards. What I’ve done with my kids, and my teams, is to point out (or lead them to point out themselves) how doing a chore made them feel: before and after. Chores feel painful before doing them. Completed chores — or more precisely the new state of the world post-chore — feels great. Both children and adults have problems enduring short-term pain for delayed rewards. This isn’t a novel concept. What would be novel is an understanding of how to rewire a brain that still assumes we only need to think about the present moment and that the uncertain future will take care of itself. Ironically, the best way to take action for the long-term seems to involve taking care of the present first. Once everything that needs to be done now is complete, and our lives and environment are stable and ordered, it seems that our restless minds have only one recourse: to work on tomorrow.
- titusjohnson 8y agoEvery time I see an allowance and chores related discussion pop up, I get the feeling that a lot of parents are unbelievably uncomfortable with the concept of discipline, consequences, and instilling responsibility. Like asking their kid to wash the dishes twice a week, and applying appropriate punishment until the chores are done is ruining some golden childhood or something.
- Markoff 8y agoso you say when i am lazy staring at mobile, while my 3yo it's helping with diapers and stuff to wife with baby, i am doing the good thing?
- aaronharnly 8y agoSee also this piece about Mexican Maya practices around chores — essentially, letting toddlers exercise their innate desire to be helpful by having them participate in housework, even though they are clumsy and slow. The distilled advice: 1. Expose kids to chores as much as possible. 2. Think small tasks, big contributions (The task can be tiny, but the key part is that it has to make a real contribution to the chore, not “mock work”) 3. Always aim to work together 4. Don't force it 5. Change your mindset about young children (Don’t assume toddlers and young children simply want to play; they may want to help) https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/06/09/616928895/how-to-get-your-kids-to-do-chores-without-resenting-it https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/06/09/6169288... HN discussion of the NPR piece: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17280710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17280710
- clairity 8y agoi still really like this seeing it the second time around. my mom would just yell at me to do chores but never really enforce a schedule. she gave me allowance regardless. my dad would make me be his helper as he tinkered around the house despite my protestations (it might have worked if he used the tom sawyer whitewashing trick however). he never gave me money. neither approach worked very well and to this day i dislike routine house work.
- ggcdn 8y agoI don't know if any parrenting approach can ever make someone like routine housework. Its more about instilling the discipline to do the work in spite of not wanting to, with the reward being a more pleasant household.
- jvagner 8y agothat's one attitude. the other is that it's an opportunity for flow, to improve your surroundings, to keep things nice, etc. i like the list above, and don't have any issues getting my 14 (almost 15) year old to do chores. but it's important at the beginning to do the chore together, and to make sure they understand how to do it, and why you'd do it. then chore time can be shared time, where the flow of the house is to get some chores done. then it's a balance, as in, "i'll do dishes, you clean the bathroom..." it needs to be a cooperative function of the household, where everyone is visibly contributing. we run a pretty minimalist house and lifestyle, but we gotta keep the house. together.
- skywhopper 8y agoSome good ideas in here for parents to consider. But take it with a grain of salt. Examples from other cultures where several children are the norm and parents spend more time in the home are ultimately not particularly helpful. In the end, every child is different, every parent is different, every household is different. No approach works for everyone. My own 17 year old daughter, an only child, has always resisted most household chores in a stubborn passive aggressive manner in the same way I did as a child, but is also nearly entirely unmotivated by monetary rewards, very different from the teenage me. Also unlike me, she is entirely self-disciplined about schoolwork, and learned to do her own laundry years ago (I didn’t until I was forced to by going to college far from home). So my own experience as a child is no help, and neither are articles like this one. And yet I suspect she’s turning out to be quite okay in the end.
- electric_muse 8y agoI would second this: each family is different. There are many ways to raise disciplined, motivated kids, and chores and allowances are certainly not necessary. I grew up with strong internal motivation because my parents helped me to see at an early age how hard work of others made them successful. That big mansion in a nearby neighborhood? The result of someone getting an education and working hard. (The adult perspective is that it’s not quite as simple, but it’s close enough.) So I developed a love of learning at an early age, not because of extrinsic rewards, but because it felt good to invest in myself. And it still does. To my mom, chores took away from study time or (rare) play time, so I was never expected to help. But I did small things when asked to help. My grandmother was aghast that my mom did my laundry until I moved out, and it was pretty easy to learn when I had to. My parents just didn’t think time doing laundry was more important than time learning calculus or playing on the computer. All that unstructured computer time developed my love for technology, and now I own a software company. They also took my young hopes and dreams seriously, rather than dismissing them since I was a kid. When at 3 years old I said I wanted a specific type of sports car, my mom opened up a savings account in my name, and we asked family never to gift me toys: only deposits into the account. By the time I was old enough to drive, I had a down payment ready to go. I learned the value of delaying instant gratification for a longer term goal. The most important way to raise healthy, motivated kids, in my mind, is to treat them as young adults and help them become intrinsically motivated.
- hnuser355 8y agoI had a lot of anxiety about chores as a kid. As a child, I wanted to be taught very much to do them, but would get yelled at for being in the middle of things if I tried to insert myself. I guess that later my parents would randomly come up chores on the spot depending on how bad of a mood they were in and how much they wanted to annoy the children. I remember still being interested in doing chores but ended up begging my parents for the household to make some sort of chore chart or something so we could know who does what on what days instead of being randomly ordered to do huge amounts of stuff on no notice alternating with nothing. Unfortunately this was not allowed as my mother thought I would scam them by only doing the chores on the chart and not waiting on their beck and call at all times. Actually, this reminds me of a lot of ineffective managers in retrospect.
- maxxxxx 8y agoMy dad was the same way. He constantly complained about me not helping but when we agreed on me helping with something he usually changed the time and then I had already other plans. It was constant drama for really no good reason. He also never showed me how to do something. On the other hand my mom usually discussed what to do, when and how, and things got done with much less friction. And yes, it really reminds me of some managers that constantly change plans and then are surprised that people don't follow enthusiastically.
- klenwell 8y agoI can relate. Especially the pointless drama. I remember dreading yard work, especially having to pick weeds. It felt so pointless and arbitrary -- a real chore. Years later I was listening to an interview on the radio with a famous naturalist or environmentalist or something. He said his parents wouldn't let him pick a weed if he couldn't identify it. Damn, I thought. That's brilliant. That's the kind of parents I wish I had.
- iamdave 8y agoHear hear. I grew up in one of those "children are meant to be seen, not heard" households, so attempts to be helpful and part of things was always rebuffed with "no you'll just getting in the way and break something". Made resentment of being given chores arbitrarily that much more intense, because why would I want to help now? Of course, being older now with my own home I work hard to keep things tidy as a point of pride, no kids but if they ever come along I'm going to make sure if they want to help out that they feel involved and maybe learn something in the process-the kind of parents I wish I had.
- kkarakk 8y agoThis article reminds me of the whole Japanese schoolkids being forced to keep their schools clean. Sure it works for some schools- the top elite ones where the kids may care about social censure. the remaining ones are typically filthy by most people's standards and in some cases encouraging bullies to shove the work onto the meek. humans in general aren't really going to care about "work" unless there is either punishment or reward involved. studies have shown how punishment scars kids, i'd prefer creating the link in a kid's mind that work=money rather than sloth=pain
- etxm 8y agoWe had something called “mom-onomics”. There was a list of “jobs” with their going rate posted on the fridge. My siblings and I could sign up for any job we wanted to make as much money as we “needed” that week. Cooking dinner paid $10 with the added benefit of getting to pick the meal (it had to include a veggie).* There were two evergreen jobs called “footrub” and ”shoulder/neck massage” that paid $1 per 15 minutes. Mom would tell you if you were doing a shit job at massage and you had to step it up to earn that dough. Mowing the lawn originally paid $20 but my mom lowered the price when we got a riding mower because we thought it was “fun” and we were always arguing about who got to do it. Footnotes: * I made tacos, Kraft macaroni, and basic AF romaine salad EVERY WEEK.
- octorian 8y agoMy parents once tried a rate-chart system as well. However, completing everything on the chart (full of stuff I really had no desire to do) would max out around $5/week. Realistic earnings from this system were far less. I soon gave up, and simply focused on other non-chore-based ways to make money that were far more profitable for my time. I think part of the problem with many chore/allowance systems is that its based on the parents' concept of money when they were kids, not adequately adjusted for inflation. So once the kids have some other way of earning money, the parents' system becomes a waste of time.
- labster 8y agoIt can't be realistic earnings though, that's what parents make. It's the share of the share of their earnings spent on luxuries that they are willing to give to their children. 90%+ of kids' money goes to luxuries, after all.
- Markoff 8y agouh, my budget for whole dinner it's way less than 10$, economically it doesn't make sense to waste so much money to motivate child
- etxm 8y ago
- ravenstine 8y agoAs someone who doesn't have kids, but still open to the remote possibility of having them, there's something I've been thinking about recently: To memory, my parents didn't start having me do chores until I was at least 10 years old. I was not a fan of doing most of what was asked of me, and in retrospect I think the problem was the system I was working for was very unfair; I usually got paid $5 a week for mowing the lawn, but the other chores I had to do paid me nothing. I don't think my parents thought they were being unfair and I'm sure they were concerned with limiting how much money I would have on hand, as well as saving their own wallet obviously. What ended up happening was I had to wait too long to make another measly $5, and the other chores I had paid nothing so I felt I was getting gypped. At the time I didn't articulate this feeling to them... not sure why, but I guess that's just something children are usually unable to do. I grew up as a lazy person; my grades were pitiful and I generally didn't try hard at anything until my early 20s when I realized that life was going to pass me by if I didn't do something about it. I don't think this is necessarily due to my parents raising me as a lazy person, but perhaps a more enterprising and less dependent attitude could have been instilled in me early on so I wouldn't have had to learn the hard way after I became an adult. In response to that experience, I've been thinking about a better system for my hypothetical children: - Get them doing chores as early as possible so that participating in work is normalized before the age they will have too many mindless distractions like video games. It's hard for me to say how much a 6 year old can do, but I'm sure there's at least a few easy tasks they could be doing on a regular basis. - Most chores that are result of primarily my actions(e.g. I choose to own a stupid water-thirsty lawn) should pay. I would want to create at least a handful of opportunities for my child to make money throughout each week that they are motivated and regularly rewarded. Adults probably forget that a week seems like a long time to a child. - Tasks like cleaning their room are unpaid because they have to learn to be responsible for their own mess. There will be a consequence for them not cleaning their room, but they can still choose to forego this task without being scolded(within reason of course). - I will be their "bank" and they can deposit and withdraw from their account so long as I approve of what they are spending their money on. Each month, they will accrue a little bit of interest which, for the amount children will realistically make, is no big hit to my wallet. This not only allows me to make sure they aren't spending their money on crap, but it gets them used to the idea of working with a bank early on. In the case they decide to fail to clean their room, for example, I can choose to withhold access to their earnings. - Besides holidays and special occasions, I won't be paying for the things that they want. If they want a toy, they're going to have to work for it and save enough money they they can afford it themselves. Their meals, educational material, and other essential items, are up to me, but they have to learn that they are ultimately responsible for their own desires or else they'd better develop a sense of patience. I presume such a system would be difficult for families who live in places such as apartments where there are only so many chores to be done. Hopefully I live in such a situation, like having a house with property, where I can find enough things for my children to do. Is the system I'm thinking of too draconian? What do you think?
- zw123456 8y agoI grew up in a farm where chores are a way of life. Our parents had a chalk board in the kitchen that listed out what each of us was supposed to do and a price next to it. We got paid a certain amount for each one. I think it's a great way to teach kids about life when they grow up.
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