Pros and Cons of Giving Kids an Allowance

We do $/week/year, starting at age five.

We do not link it to chores- I liked the philosophy from the book The Opposite of Spoiled. Chores are an expectation for being a member of the family, allowance is to help them learn money management. Different functions.

I do one dollar x age per week. So, for my seven year old he gets 7 bucks a week. This is just an allowance and isn’t tied to chores. We have a special star chart where if he practices his violin, does some house chore request, or cleans his room enough he can earn over time a 10 dollar bonus.

He is required to split the weekly allowance between three categories: save, spend, and give. He must put at least one dollar into each category. Spend he can do whatever he wants with—want a random toy or candy bar you see at the grocery store? It would come out of that category. Give is for holiday and birthday gifts for friends and family and we also have some left over that we give to charity together. Save is money set aside until he’s 18. I apply an interest rate to it so he can see it grow.

I love this system. We don’t have fights at stores any more because he can have whatever he wants, provided he’s saved up for it. As he’s matured, I’ve seen him decide not to buy things because their value is too low for the price in his mind or because he wants to save his money for a bigger thing. When we have to charity this year, he learned how many meals the charity could serve with each dollar he donated and it prompted a good discussion about the stuff he buys (“that stuffy I bought was 10 dollars. That’s the same as 50 meals at this charity”).

I tried to do the allowance thing but it was too much to keep up with so I stopped it and went the route of, families all work together for the greater good of the family. When my kids wanted something and it wasn't birthday or Christmas time coming up, if it was reasonable, I bought it. It seems to have worked fine because my kids are in finance and my 24 year old just bought a house.

Yes! When we tied money to chores my kids happily skipped chores, especially after birthdays and holidays when they were feeling flush. Since we split them, both functions have worked much smoother.

I pay my son $15/hr for helping with yard work. That’s for toys he really wants but we think aren’t worth it. He usually declines to spend it on said toy after thinking it over.

Trying to find a reasonable amount but hard to determine?

Will allowance change because of age?

And if you don’t have kids how much do you think it’s reasonable?

I’m an 80’s baby and I got $1.00 a week to do chores. I thought it was great! What’s everyone else’s experience?

I'm thinking of starting an allowance with my kid. It came about because the school is having a book fair this month and I realized kid has never experienced buying anything on his own, or much experience with money in general.

I do talk about the prices of things and he sees me shop. But that's a bit different from kid getting to make his own choices.

We give a monthly allowance that's not tied to any chores. It's just to help them with budgeting and saving. The older they get, the more money they receive each month. There's different categories for them to divide their money into, and what percentage goes where

Yeah, we do $5/week — $3 for spending money, $1 for savings, and $1 for donating. (Around his birthday and around Christmas we put it all into savings and donating for a month or so.)

We don’t buy him any little toys or other treats other than occasionally snacks when we’re out and about — that’s what his spending money is for. We help him identify what he wants, identify a price, and save up for it, as well as look at thrift stores/Marketplace.

It’s great math practice and a great early understanding of budgeting! It’s also done away with the pestering to buy little toys at the grocery store, etc.

Edit - I do sometimes buy him books because well, they’re books and they’re in a different category 🤗

Edit 2 - started on his 5th birthday. It took a while for him to fully grasp all the nuances, but I think that timing was good.

Edit 3 lol - we don’t tie it to his household chores, except in a big picture sense of “you’re a big kid now so you need to help our family home keep running. Big kids also get an allowance.” But no chore chart tied to allowance or anything.

Yes, absolutely we started with a dollar per age 4. I think it's really important to teach financial literacy different families have different ways to deal with it, like you can say you have to save half or you can put no limits on it. You can tie it to chores or not by nine years old, my kids had Greenlight debit cards where you can see their transactions you can give them allowance, etc. kids are now 12 18 and 21 and pretty good with money.

Context: My friend got into an argument with his groupmates as they won't do the project due to work. He told me that most of them had to work constantly, just to not starve and had no free time, they weren't given an allowance. We find it highly suspicious as he told me that they had the latest iPhone 13 and all but one had AirPod Pros. He is a Grade 10 high-school student, while I'm a college student.

This got me thinking, is this parenting method considered harsh, and what are the pros and cons of this style of parenting? I will be making a few assumptions.

IMPORTANT EDIT: I forgot to include high school in the title. Also to clarify things, by allowance I mean lunch money

Assumptions:

1. They have the money to do so
2. Kids aren't spoilt/didn't do anything that's bad enough for them to revoke their allowance
3. Lunch isn’t from home and they have to get their own lunch money
4. The kid is an above-average kid that can get As with sufficient revision (You guys can change this up)

Note: I'm not looking for a CMV-style of discussion, I just want to see how the community feels about it :)

We do allowance but I differentiate that from basic chores. They are expected to clean their rooms, do dishes and generally help out around the house because they are part of the family.

They get a small regular allowance to learn budgeting and saving, but can earn extra for bigger jobs. That way, they learn **“we contribute because we’re a family”** and **“if I want something expensive, I need to save or earn for it.”** Sounds like a good middle ground to me.

I’ve commented about this before but can’t look for my comment right now. If you want more details, I’ll find it later. Basically yes, we do allowance but it’s not tied to chores. Chores are things we all do to help each other take care of our home and belongings. Allowance is to help our kids learn about money. I took this advice from financial expert advice. My kids get $1 per year of age every week (so $9 a week for my 9 year old). Half is spending that they can use on whatever they want. The other half is divided between save and share jars. We have a savings account for each kid and deposit their savings every so often. Their share money is for them to decide where they want to share it (charity, non-profit, etc) to help foster giving just like we also donate to various places.

You can certainly do smaller amounts and have a different amount to save but it’s helped a lot with the asking for things when we’re in stores. They have their own money. They’re learning if they spend it regularly on little things then they might not have money when they find something they really really want. And sometimes they want something bigger and when they figure out how many weeks it will take to save up, they can really decide whether it’s actually worth it.

We do $5/week no strings attached. We do buy him some things he wants in the “educational/personal development” category but set a limit on the amount we’ll spend (like we go to the art supply store, we will pay for $20, above that is his allowance). He mostly saves it to be honest, but he did spring $25 for some new Yoto cards last week.

We do an allowance, and we expect regular chores. If the kids want to do EXTRA chores to earn some money, that's fine. Everyone helps clean the house because we all live here. I want my kids to make decisions with their money so they can learn about their values and make low-stakes mistakes. It's been very fun to see what they do and don't spend money on, then how they feel about it later.

My husband and I are feeling very conflicted on the idea of whether we want to do allowance or not with our children.

On one hand, we want our children to learn money management young. My husband knows a lot about money and investing and he thinks its important to instill that into our children. Which I 100% agree because I was raised by parents who probably weren't the best at money management and I wish I was taught.

On the other hand, we want our children to contribute to household chores whether they get money or not because when you become an adult, you will be responsible for your own space and chores/cleaning/cooking are just things adult need to learn in order to be successful with their personal space. If that makes sense.

Just wondered if anyone here found a happy medium with allowance and maybe how they went about it. I saw someone on Tik Tok say that their parents would give them allowance but tax what they earned and how she said she hated it when she was a kid, but grateful for that as an adult because it's real life when you start working as a professional. It was an idea that made me laugh at first, but now I'm kind of considering it, Lol! Anyway, just reaching out to see if anyone had any ideas. Anything they had as a child, or any ideas they currently do with their children.

We have never done this for our kids. We have 4 children, two teens and two under 10. Now that we have teenagers, they are regularly asking for items that are kinda pricey and that my wife and I really don't know how to approach this.

For example, my son wants a gaming computer. We have a computer that the kids use for homeschooling, and that's kinda all we want them to use it for.

We have told him that if he wants the computer, he will just need to wait and save up for it; saving birthday money, holidays, etc.

My son and his sister, the teens, have asked if they can have an allowance for doing things around the house, behavior, grades, etc

I don't really like the idea of having to give them money for things they should already be doing.

So how do other parents do this? Do you use some form of monetary system with your kids?

Yes. We give our kids an allowance so they can practice budgeting and money management from an early age. We think that‘s an important life skill.

Allowance isn’t linked to chores or grades in any form for us. Chores are a requirement and so is applying yourself in school.

Allowance for 10-Year-Old?

We are struggling with behavior! My go-to’s are logical consequences, natural consequences, and reflective goal-setting conversations together where we might troubleshoot a routine that wasn’t working and compromise together on a new routine or rehearse a healthier way to express ourselves, etc.

The behaviors are just getting excessive. I’m also struggling with the issue that sometimes the logical consequence isn’t realistic.

I’ve been on the fence about incorporating allowance for years, but don’t want to demotivate him in doing chores, schoolwork, manners, etc by him thinking that he’s just doing those things to make money. I’d love to hear from people whose kids earn an allowance!

Do you do an allowance? Why or why not?

If you do, how much money is given or earned each week? Where does that money go? Is it cash or digital? Where does your child save it?

What are your rules about bringing money to school, what it can be spent on, etc?

Do you do any routines of saving a certain %, giving/donating a certain %, etc?

Do you also have your child earn the allowance with certain goals (chores, behavior, homework, honesty, etc), or is it a set amount each week?

Thanks!!!

We also use Greenlight. We have two elementary age kids and their accounts automatically each get $5/week, which we split into $4 spending and $1 in their savings.

They can spend their money once per season, and my tween is now starting to understand that she will need to skip spending it sometimes if she wants to save up for bigger ticket items.

We don’t tie it to regular chores because those are just responsibilities of being in a home. But we do occasionally offer additional allowance for special chores like weeding the yard.

We do use it for behavior issues as well. Both of our kids have each had a behavioral issue that we’ve struggled with for years, and when we started saying that we would deduct from their accounts in relation to the issue, it significantly lessened the issue. This is a change only since they’ve gotten older, we wouldn’t have done this when they were toddlers and incapable of rational decision making. What they don’t know yet is that when we take money out of their spending allowance, we put it in their savings.

I give a weekly allowance to my daughter (5). It is not tied to chores. I’ve been really happy with how it’s been working. She’s allowed it to spend it on anything appropriate. At first, she bought these little cheap toys as soon as she had enough. After a little while, though, she got tired of doing that. Now, whenever she spots a toy she just has to have in the store, we ask if she has enough saved and wants to use her allowance to buy it. Most of the time, she examines the toy for a few minutes and decides she’ll save up for something better instead.

She’s learned a lot about short term rewards compared with longer term benefits, how to value things, her own real interests, and how to gauge when something will fall apart or is overpriced.

I don’t hear about kids getting allowances any more. My kids have always been expected to help out in certain areas like cleaning up after themselves, or if we ask them to go take out the trash, help with the dog, etc… besides cleaning up after themselves, it’s only wen we need an extra hand here n there that we ask for help. For things like that, we don’t pay them. The mindset is if mom n dad have a lot on their plate and need a hand, u do it because we should work together as a family to get things done that affects us all. They ask for money and I’m able to give it to them, I do. They don’t ask too often. But they have mentioned how they wouldn’t mind doing extra chores regularly for an allowance. I’m all for it, but I’m clueless on what kids get paid for chores these days lol. We are pay check to pay check. Don’t have a lot of money but we make it from one check to the other. Do you pay $X per week or $X amount per chore? How do u divide up the chores? Do they alternate or do ur kids each just have a set they always do?

I’m wondering what other parents do for a reward system or allowance for helping out around the house… especially with all this inflation. What’s fair and how much do your kids do?