Poll Results

Our Sunday Poll this past week was about your feelings towards giving your child an allowance. The majority of you agreed that giving your child an allowance helps to teach them money management. You can view the actual results here.

My son is 3 years old and I am thinking of giving him an allowance. I have read so many different views on how to handle the allowance that it has left me throwing my hands up in the air. Some “experts” say that it is best not to link behavior with an allowance, others say to not link chores to an allowance, and some say that it is all about behavior & chores and that is how an allowance is earned.

After doing a lot of reading, I have decided to not link the allowance to behavior & chores. Chores are what one does in a family- it isn’t a pay by the hour gig. Lord knows that if it was an hourly gig, I would be a very rich woman right now. I have started incorporating chores into our son’s routine and bad behavior has always equaled losing privileges. This is how I plan to continue handling this situation.

We will be giving a weekly allowance of $3 to him. This figures that he will get one dollar per year of his age (until it gets too expensive or until he is of a working age).

I have read that it is also important to teach our children the art of money management. A mom in my life, whom I admire very much for her knack at parenting and being an amazing mother, shared with me that each of her children receive three envelopes of money. One envelope for spending, one envelope for saving, and then another for tithing. I thought that was such a good idea particularly because I think a lot of parent’s give their children money, but they never teach them how to manage it. When our children grow up and go out into the world they have absolutely no money management skills. I feel like this is why so many kid’s (myself included) get themselves into so much debt when they get into the real world and are out on their own.

I just wanted to discuss the results and thank everyone for their input. Please be sure to take our poll on Grocery Budgets this week.

Published May 07, 2006 by:

Amy Allen Clark is the founder of MomAdvice.com. You can read all about her here.

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