Tonight I was sitting in my office at home when my daughter came in with rubber gloves on. She looked at me and said, “Daddy, I’m starting to clean the bathrooms so I can get my allowance!”. I told her, “great job” and she headed in to the first bathroom to start cleaning. About 5 minutes later she came back in with a funny smile on her face. I said, “What’s up honey?”. “Daddy, I was thinking. If I clean all three bathrooms, that means I’m getting $1 per bathroom”, she said. I could tell by the look on her face that she was feeling like that wasn’t enough.
Our daughter “Emily” actually earns $7 per week for her allowance if she does an adequate number of chores. Earlier this week she came to me and asked if she could have some of her allowance early because she wanted to buy a book at the Book Fair at school. She already had a few dollars in her room so she asked if she could get $4 early so that she could buy a specific book. I said that seemed okay and explained to her that I would give her the money early but that meant that she was committing to her chores later in the week and it was a promise. I explained to her that this was similar to when someone goes to the bank and asks to borrow money early so that they can buy something they want or need.
Back to tonight. Emily had been thinking while she was cleaning the first bathroom and she realized she had to clean three bathrooms and she was only going to get an additional three dollars at the end of the week. She was clearly not happy about this. After laughing in my head when she came in to my office, I took the time to talk about how it doesn’t feel that good to be doing work to help earn the allowance that she’d already spent. I told her that I don’t like how it feels to have to do work to pay back money that I borrow which is why we don’t ever borrow money for things. As I was talking about this with her I could see the light bulb pop on in her head. It’s going to be very interesting to see if she wants to get an advance on her allowance in the future. While she loves getting her allowance, I definitely don’t think she likes working once the money has been spent.