Is it a good idea to use an allowance to recognize the accomplishment of chores or good grades?

Hello. My name is Ron Blue, and I've had the privilege of having five children. They're all adult children now, but we raised our children and what we found was that each child was unique. They thought differently; they planned differently; they spent differently. And so the question came up a lot in our lives about an allowance. What should we do for an allowance? Should we pay them an allowance?

Now, Judy and I developed a philosophy that we did not have allowances for our kids. What we did have was an envelope system where we had amounts of money in at least five different envelopes, but we didn't give allowances that basically said you can spend it any way that you want, because we wanted to teach our children how to budget, how to live within constraints. And an allowance is really just an amount. It might be the "spend" amount of one of the envelopes, but we never, ever, called it an "allowance."

We also never, ever, believed in paying for good grades. Our idea, our philosophy, was that doing your academic best was your responsibility. You're the one that has the opportunity to get good grades, and you're the one that pays the price if you don't. And, you have the opportunities if you do get good grades. What you don't want to do as a parent is to either enable your children or to force them to certain behaviors for your own benefit. I think that the most important thing that you can teach a child is personal responsibility.

So, we never paid for grades. We never paid for chores. In other words, you make your bed because you live in the house. You help with the dishes because you live here. You do certain things because you are a part of this family. You don't get paid for those things. Nobody's going to pay me when I get married for making the bed. I can guarantee you that my wife doesn't pay me when I make the bed. And I don't believe that you should pay a child for things that they need to take personal responsibility for. So, I philosophically don't believe in allowances, but I do believe in budgeting and I do believe in allowing your children to make financial choices.

Click here for the May 14, 2009 Blog Entry