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Teens doing chores: Mission possible? – Part II

July 27th, 2007 by Harvey

Here are are a few more ideas, following up on last week’s article, to help you implement a chores/allowance system with your teen.

Petty Cash = more autonomy
If you’re using a system like Active Allowance, with a virtual Family Bank instead of a piggy bank, be sure to let them know they can write a check for “spending money” any time they want so they can have cash in their wallet……and they don’t have to tell you each thing they buy.
In our case, I mistakenly thought our 14 year old understood this but I never explained it explicitly. It was the source of a great amount of unstated frustration for her which festered over several months and created unnecessary animosity towards the system. It took a while to get back on track.
Add longer term goals
Older kids are able to work towards longer term goals. Next week, I’ll write about an idea we used successfully with our 13 year old this past year – the “big-ticket item”.

Make each point significant
There’s a danger with teens that, if a point’s not worth much, they can too easily shrug it off (“I don’t need to do that thing today”). The type of checklist where there are many responsibility items all in one category, and the total points add up to a small number, usually works best.
By doing this, you’d be telling your teen “I’ve kept the list small, to relatively few important things, but if you don’t do them, it has a significant impact on your allowance. It’s important to us that you do them”.
Consider not including Homework on the list
If your kids haven’t developed the homework habit by the time they’re teens, connecting it to allowance will not likely make much of a difference.
While all family philosophies are different, we don’t include homework on the list for any of our children. However, for the younger ones, we do include “homework finished by 6:00 pm” as a bonus item to earn an extra point. And for all our kids, we also give bonus points for finishing major projects (yikes!) early. And it works! Each of our kids accomplished this herculean task twice this year. And they’ve lived to tell the tale