Your Children Are Listening: Nine Messages They Need to Hear from You

income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” To that end, when Catie turned four, we began giving her an allowance so she could start to learn how money works and grasp the reality of spending and saving.
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    ACTIVITIES FOR RESPONSIBILITY
     
Teach fiscal responsibility.
Give an allowance.
Be responsible for time.
Have pets.
Teach decision making.
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    Our first question was how much allowance Catie should earn. Though the precise amount depends on your family’s financial situation, the cost of living, and your children’s needs, the experts I spoke to offered a few suggestions. Start with a weekly allowance that is the equivalent of half their age (so $2 for a four-year-old). An increase of $1 per week for each year of your children’s lives is realistic until they reach their mid-teens. At that point, when they begin to drive and date, you can calculate their expenses and establish a reasonable allowance that covers their needs. Overall, better to start low and build than to give your children the big bucks now; kids shouldn’t start in the corner office either!
    Sarah and I decided that Catie would earn her allowance not for fulfilling specific responsibilities, such as making her bed or keeping her room clean, but rather for the totality of her contributions to the family. At the same time, as I mentioned before, Catie would get her pay “docked” if she didn’t do the jobs she was assigned. This approach introduced her to the notions of work and exchange of goods and services for money and showed her that if she didn’t do her job, she wouldn’t get paid, just like in the adult world.
    We found a great piggy bank that had four compartments labeled Save, Spend, Donate, and Invest. She is required to deposit 25 percent of her allowance into each slot. Helping her to decide whether to buy something right away with her spending money or to save up for something more expensive sends meta-messages of long-term planning, patience, and delayed gratification. Our hope is that learning to save will make Catie more resistant to the messages of “Gotta have it now!” with which popular culture will soon be bombarding her, and will help her grow up to be a financially responsibleadult. Another meta-message, that of compassion and generosity, is conveyed by having her donate a quarter of her weekly allowance to her favorite charity. And we promised her that as soon as she fills up her Invest compartment, she can open up a savings account at our local bank just like her mom and dad.
    An important meta-message we want Catie to get is that, as the saying goes, money doesn’t grow on trees (at least not in our family). If she ever spends her allowance before the next “payday” (it hasn’t happened yet), we won’t be giving out any payday loans to tide her over. A related meta-message of fiscal responsibility is learning the hard lesson of living within one’s means.
    Eliana thinks that one of the most important lessons about responsibility her two daughters need to learn is to be responsible for how they spend their time. When she was young, her parents pretty much left her and her brother to their own devices on how to spend their time. If they were bored, her parents would say, “Well, find something to entertain yourselves.” But, these days, she sees so many children whose lives are so programmed that they never seem to have ownership of their time. Between organized sports, music lessons, and study hours, most kids she sees rarely even have free time. And when they are bored, they simply entertain themselves with television or video games.
    Eliana doesn’t want that to happen to her children. So she keeps her daughter’s extracurricular activities to a minimum and makes sure that her girls have plenty of free time. When either of them say they are bored, Eliana tells them that they are responsible for their time and it is up to them to find ways to fill it (and because they aren’t allowed to watch much TV and don’t own a video-game console, those aren’t options). She provides them with plenty of art materials, musical instruments, and games. And on occasion, she will give them ideas about what they can do with their time. Both girls are pretty good at taking ownership of their time, and when they have no plans or are bored, they take it upon themselves to find