Letting children earn money

By Karen Best Wright, www.RaisingYourGrandchildren.com

I have never been one who handed kids an allowance. I know a lot of people do. I just have never been one of them. I do, however, encourage my grandchildren to earn money by doing work. They know how much cleaning out the litter box or sweeping the floor is worth. Our home has only hard floors, no carpet, so there are plenty of floors to sweep.

Today I walked into the kitchen and saw my 6 year-old granddaughter at the kitchen sink washing dishes. The sink was about to over-flow with soapy water, and her sleeves were soaking wet. She was scrubbing out a measuring cup with a long-handled dish scrub brush and said, "This is like I am scratching its back." I thought that was very cute and creative thinking.

I was curious at why she was wanting to wash dishes and decided to ignore the water that was getting on the floor and just let her do her thing, while I was in and out of the kitchen doing my own thing. Finally I asked her, "My, why are you being so ambitious?" She answered simply, "To Get Money. Plus, I get more since you didn't even ask me to do the dishes." You just can't get a cuter or more industrious child than that.

I do not pay children to clean up their own things, but we are never short on jobs that can be done for cash. There are always floors to be swept, a litter box to be cleaned, or pets to be fed, and my little one will do them all. I hope she stays this way.

Karen Wright, B.S. Community Health Education
Grandmother raising grandchildren
www.RaisingYourGrandchildren.com
www.BlogforHealthyLiving.com

Comments

[Susan Adcox]

Mowing lawns is a fairly common and quite lucrative part-time job in our part of the world, where grass grows like crazy for most of the year. But I've never had a kid come to my door selling homebaked bread. I can promise you that if your baker son had come to my door, I would have bought some bread, even if I had to cut off the lawn-mowing brother to do it!

BTW wise parents are always aware that they didn't do their job perfectly. Only fools believe that they are infallible. I am sure that you worked hard at parenthood and gave your children lots of love, and that's really all that any parent can do.

[Karen Wright]

Thank you Susan for the comment. I too agree that it is a good idea for kids to have their own money to budget. When 2 of my sons were teenagers, they earned their money with parental support. For example we had 2 nice lawn mowers. One of our son's used one of them to mow lawns in our neighborhood. The other son enjoyed baking bread. So I provided all of the ingredients and he baked and sold bread to neighbors. We did pay for their drum and karate lessons, but they earned the extra money they needed with us providing the lawn mower, gas, and bread ingredients. There are so many things that I wish I could go back and do differently. But the decisions on how we provided money for them to budget is not one I would do differently.

[Susan Adcox]

What a great story! I can just see and hear your little granddaughter! Personally I think allowances are a good idea, especially when kids are older. I like the idea of kids sharing in the family's financial resources as well as sharing in the chores. I also think it is nice for kids not to have to be constantly asking for money but instead to have a reliable (if small) income that they have to budget.