We decided, now that Boo is 4 years old, she's old enough to have some "official" chores around the house. So I made her a list of daily chores. It's very basic... feeding the pets 2x a day, brushing her teeth 2x a day, and picking up her toys before bed. She has been amazingly responsible about it so far, and finds great joy in remembering, even when it slips our minds. She's awefully cute, too, when feeding the pets and talking to them ("Wait, Chucky...wait, here you go... good boy!")
My question to you is on the allowance issue. Part of me believes that you do chores in a family BECAUSE it's your responsibility to help out the family... money shouldn't be the incentive. But I also want her to learn the value of money and how hard work helps her "earn" rewards. Thoughts? What do you / will you do with yours? Is she too young to worry about it yet? Thanks for weighing in, and I'll let you know what we decide.
2 comments:
We read some books on allowances a million years ago and used this rough formula - one dollar per year of age. So five year olds get five dollars a week but that money had rules. We used 4 jars labeled spending $, charity, long term saving and short term saving. I can't remember the % that went into each jar but it was roughly 10% to charity, 25-30% long term saving, 15-20% short term saving and the rest spending. Allowance was not connected to chores - a chore is the price of living with your family, mommy doesn't get paid for making dinner. If the child is old enough to get allowance they are old enough to hold family responsibility but we didn't want to get into "paying" for chores. There were occasionally extra ways to earn $$. There are other rules and suggestions with this method if you're interested.
H gets $0.25day for feeding the cats, setting the table, and making his bed. We started this mainly because he was so jealous of L getting potty treats, and he didn't have a specific reward system in place. He also started regressing in several ways, so we needed to make it "important" and fun to be Four years old. It's worked fairly well, although all of our consistency could use some improvement.
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