Five Benefits to Giving Your Kids an Allowance Tied to Work

Are you giving your kids an allowance? Is it free money? Is it tied to work they must do to get paid? Is it pay-per-chore?

In our home, we’ve decided to give our kids a set weekly amount based on age — as long as they do their daily assigned chores. They also have to do household work that everyone participates in, like filling the dishwasher or straightening the living room. Those are separate from the specific assigned daily chores each child completes.

By having our chore time tied to the weekly allowance, we are teaching our kids the value of work. My friend uses a pay-per-chore system. Her kids must complete a set number of chores per week without pay, but once the chores are done they are free to pick and choose from the pay-per-chore list.

Either of these methods of giving your kids an allowance tied to work meets the same goal. If you need a chore system, this post has a great collection of them.

1. Giving your kids an allowance teaches the value of money. It is hard help kids understand the value of money. Before you are grown up, working and paying bills, it is genuinely hard to learn the connection between it all. Let’s say you give your child $10 as an allowance and you take them shopping. If they are having to spend money instead of having you buy the items for them, they can then see how quickly money can just go away. In addition, if their allowance is related to work, the kids can see how hard they worked for their money and they will be less likely to blow it on unimportant stuff. When given the opportunity to purchase an item, the child will actually think about whether or not they need to buy that item, instead of making rash decisions.
2. Giving your kids an allowance they’ve earned will lead to less entitlement. With so much being said about entitlement and the so-called “Entitlement Generation” these days, you might want to make sure that entitlement is not an attribute your kids showcase. Kids who earn and spend their own money are less likely to be entitled and expect others to buy stuff for them. Kids who receive an allowance, especially those who work for it, tend to be more independent. This is a skill that is definitely needed once the kids are grown and on their own.
3. Giving your kids an allowance leads to more appreciation for what they have. Because they have their own money and spend their own money on the things they have, kids who receive an allowance tend to have more appreciation for their possessions. Thanks to this, they also tend to take better care of their stuff.  
4. Giving your kids an allowance gives them a motivation to save. Kids who receive an allowance and save part or all of it can see their savings grow quickly, which is a great motivator to continue saving. Oftentimes too, placing goals on those savings can help even more. How old is your child? What would they like to save for? A new video game console? Maybe a car for when they turn 16? There is no goal too big.
5. Giving your kids an allowance will help them learn the relationship between work and money. If, in fact, you tie allowance to chores, this gives your child an early start to understanding the relationship between work and money. As adults, we work, get paid, and pay for our necessary expenses. Since this is essentially what much of our adult lives are reliant on, it is a great thing to learn in advance and from people who care about them as opposed to having to learn it once they are dropped into the real world.

Have you thought about giving your children an allowance tied to work?