For the past two years we've been quite careless about giving our eldest son his allowance. By that I mean that we keep on forgetting to give him his allowance on the assigned day. As a result, our son has begun to lose heart, thinking,now, that an allowance might not be something worth expecting. Whatever trust he might have had that we're going to keep our word about giving him an allowance is clearly diminished.
It also seems we're giving our son an insufficient amount of money. I'm convinced it's not a good idea to give a 10-year-old a lot of money. Something tells me that my son hasn't developed the necessary perseverance to keep extensive amounts of money for a long time with a specific purpose in mind. From experience I can say that fifth graders are still very concrete in their thinking. Long-term planning is a skill they begin to develop in Elementary School, but it's not a generally an acquired ability till the end of Middle School.
We've had to study the situation with a bit more detail; what other kids get, the level of tolerance to frustration of our child, his ability for long-term planning and our own capacity to be rigorous were just some of the factors at play.
From just briefly browsing on the net, there seems to be a general consensus that giving an allowance is a sound educational tool. Some parents give an allowance based on their child doing chores around the house. Others assign an allowance based on grades and good behavior. I give my eldest son an allowance whether he behaves or not, whether he gets good grades or not and whether he does chores or not. Getting grades at the level of his abilities, behaving well, and doing age-appropriate chores are expectations that emanate from being part of our family.
We've come to the agreement with our son that we'll give him an allowance on a specific day of the week, that he'll remind us and that the allowance is for a specific goal. If he wants more money than that of his allowance, he's going to have to do extra things to earn it. Yesterday he offered to rake the neighbor's front yard. There's nothing better than the sense of satisfaction that comes from a reward for work.
2 comments:
When you've got two+ children, there's the inevitable comparison. "Why does he get an allowance and I don't?"
So far, we've been able to tackle that by providing piggy banks for all. Everyone gets to save up, but only those of a certain age get an allowance.
Awesome post, Marcelo. You are the consummate dad; father to 4 boys, a teacher and an educator and esteemed principal. You know parenting from many angles. You are passionate about the subject matter. Your long standing experience and knowledge is invaluable to the people whose lives you touch directly and people like me who go to you for questions like, or “he wakes up at 2 am wailing of leg cramps”. Even his pediatrician and an expensive pediatric orthopedist could not figure it out. You, from your wealth of experience told me about the simple banana remedy, and it worked!
Thank you for engaging my “push” for you to write about this. Thank you for creating this blog.
I tried to vote on your survey but I could not because there is no category of “it depends” I believe like all else, the notion of allowance is relative.
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