Emily Chan
The practice of paying children for doing chores around the house has been a long-standing one. According to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, American children receive an average of $800 per year in exchange for completing chores.
It’s meant to motivate them to help out while giving them a chance to learn how to manage their money. But what’s more likely to happen is that once kids stop receiving an allowance, they won’t have any incentive to clean up after themselves in the future.
Plus, supplying kids with a bunch of cash leads to them blowing it on candy and cheap toys. There’s no money management going on, then.
TikToker and parenting coach Lisa Bunnage (@bratbustersparenting) is discussing how she taught her kids about finances more effectively.
The most important thing is to keep allowances and chores separate. You want your children to understand that chores are just something that needs to be done.
When you live at home, you have to contribute to the household, whether it’s washing the dishes, vacuuming, or doing laundry.
You can give your children allowances, but just don’t connect them to chores. Lisa believes that all kids deserve an allowance to learn how to spend money wisely. This is how she went about it.
So when her kids were three-years-old, she did something called “Mum’s bank.” She wrote one kid’s “bank information” on a sheet of notebook paper. It included the date, description, and debit/credit balance.
On the other side of the same sheet of paper, she had her second kid’s bank information. Every Saturday morning, she would gather her kids together to go over their allowances.
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