At the age of 8 my kids get five dollars a week in allowance. Largely for discretionary spending to procure items that I probably would have purchased for them eventually anyway using the exact same money. But it gives them a sense of control and enhances their skills at budgetology. Or whatever. They get the five bucks and basically have to do very little in the way of earning that money. I figure that's why it an allowance and not a wage.
After one child started receiving allowance, he quickly identified a massive remote controlled red T-Rex that cost $129.99 and he simply had to have it. He saved five dollars every single week until he had enough and as it happened we got the last one of this beast before it went off the market and it was on sale for $89.99. He was over the top proud and had some cash to spare with which he bought his little brother a toy of some kind. I should have felt a swell of pride as well.
But let me share this about allowance. It's something we allow kids to have. A freedom of sorts. But it is also a shackle. To physically posess 15 dollars in 5 dollar increments ready to distribute every seven days is a completely unreasonable request of a grown adult living in an age where ATMs dispense only 20 dollar bills. And no, there is no way in hell that I am giving out $60 a week because the bank people don't understand parenting. More weeks than not along the journey to T-Rex, I forgot allowance or just didn't have the proper change or any cash at all. And so it was that an elaborate IOU system was birthed.
This IOU allowance system was as clever and well thought out as its predecessor, "5-bucks-a week-system". This IOU system was called "the Mommy Bank" and each kid had a passport shaped notebook which was stored on a shelf in their own locker. In the front of the passport I would write their daily to-do list including things like showers and room cleaning and homework and in the back kept a tally of the weekly allowance that they were storing in the Mommy Bank. See how the allowance was loosely and cleverly tied with the to-do list?! See how there were no more stops at the gas station begging for change for a 20 every Friday afternoon?! The invention of the passport really did hold life together for quite a while, maybe even more than a year. Checking their passport daily was part of the after school ritual and completing their passport lists was a given before any fun could be had.
The passport peril began, however, when the Mommy Bank tally that sat at the back of the passport began accepting deposits. A 20 from a birthday, a buck from the Tooth Fairy. Just cash that kids didn't want to get lost and I didn't mind spending on coffee. And thus the balances grew and grew. And you can do the math because after about a year and a half with allowances plus deposits times three eligible children who don't ever spend any money because they already have plenty of crap... Well, suffice it to say that when the first request to buy an iPad came in it was clear that the Mommy Bank was not backed by the FDIC.
You probably thought that this would be a little tirade against allowance - not asking kids to do enough, creating a generation of small entitled whiners, not imbuing a work ethic... But it's not. I might write that later. For now, the point here is that the process of distributing allowance is a chore added to the parental to-do list. And while I'm not totally sure it's worth it, we will try again, for a third time. But mark my words - if I strike out again, allowance is dead to me until college.