Teaching Kids Dollars & Sense» Blog Archive » Why give your kids an Allowance?

Doing more than just “winging” it

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September 6th, 2007 by Harvey

You’ve probably already heard a great many reasons for why an allowance makes sense for kids. Without going through the whole laundry list yet again, here are a couple of important ones worth emphasizing:

Creating many “Teaching Moments”: Unlike parental education about the birds and the bees (usually a one-time discussion; future attempts receive an “Eewwww!”), this is a subject that needs to be discussed on an ongoing basis over many years (e.g. making spending choices, saving for a goal, charity, etc). That means that parents need to create a sustainable system that will cause earning/spending/saving/sharing issues to arise and be discussed in a positive way…..the “Teaching Moments”.
Preaching vs Doing: It’s important to make this learning part of everyday life. I’m not sure about your kids, but mine seem to be impervious to “preaching” (especially from Dad), but they learn amazingly well by “doing”.

Just a thought for the day

One Response

Rubyn Marcusohn writes:
October 6th, 20072:54 pmat

This is great. Both for the existing “active” use and for, what I believe, would be some excellent potential opportunities. How about some school educational applications? Surely, this would fit in nicely within both a “Home Economics 001″ and a “Teach Responsibilties” scenarios.

And how about political applications? For all of us wrestling with First-Past-The-Post vs Mixed Member Proportional, how about getting politicians to act responsibly and voters to vote responsibly? If that were the case, we wouldn’t need all of these voodoo politics. Do you think that you could develop a Responsible Government module. This would reward politicians for “alien behaviour” such as representing their constituents responsibly (when in government) and dealing only with the issues when electioneering (with a zap every time they go negative…). Voters would be rewarded for in-depth research, participation, consultations, debates, and, oh-yeah, voting. Can anyone out there come up with some good appications here?