Two weeks ago, my older son asked me if he could have his allowance back. He asked calmly, without loud declarations about oppression or injustice. Alec is 12, and about a year ago I decided to suspend his allowance for three reasons: He was refusing to improve his dreadful manners; he was consistently forgetting to do the chores his father and I had assigned him a few years before; and he was chronically losing mittens, hats, and even shoes, in response to which I was chronically deducting small amounts from his weekly pay. (He was also being especially brutish toward his brother, though I told myself this was irrelevant.)
Bottom line: I had become a consummate nag, and I did not like it. So I pulled out what I thought would surely be a powerful weapon: money. I also typed out a list detailing (1) Alec's household responsibilities and (2) behavioral and hygiene goals suitable for the higher primates. Together, we agreed on a place to post the list, and he vowed that he would make a better effort to follow it. "When you show me some progress, we'll talk about your allowance again," I said. I walked away from this civilized exchange feeling proud of myself and my rational authority. Well, we all know about pride.
Lo these many months later, Alec is taller, and his voice is deeper, but he still hunches at the table, knees drawn up to his chin, consuming his food with orchestral sound effects and using his left hand as the companion utensil to his fork. Worse, his hair (a hill I will not die on) is so long that it swings through the spaghetti sauce when he dips his mouth toward the plate to slurp up the noodles. He never brings down the upstairs garbage or sweeps under the table without a reminder. The one big change is that I no longer nag him about these tasks, perhaps because nagging is now reserved for homework. As for my having deprived him of any disposable income, the year-round generosity of assorted relatives has blunted all the incentive I had hoped to create with my grand moratorium.
I'm not sure exactly when I started giving Alec an allowance: first grade, perhaps. I did so almost entirely because of peer pressure from Alec's friends. The dirty truth is that as much as I did not want Alec to feel unfairly deprived, I did not want his friends to see me as a miserly witch or to pity Alec for having that miserly witch as a mother. Basically, I caved.
Like many older, well-educated parents, I read way too much child-rearing advice before Alec was even out of my womb. Very quickly, having absorbed a terrifying surfeit of information about death by SIDS, breast-milk toxins, and choking on small objects, I moved ahead to reading about every subsequent stage my child would achieve if he should survive his perilous infancy. And I found myself lingering over the issue of allowance. Why? Because neither my sister nor I ever received one from our parents. Of course, we badgered them intermittently about the injustice and humiliation: All our friends received an allowance. But Mom and Dad held firm: Chores were simply a part of our family responsibility, not paid jobs, and if either of us needed or wanted money to buy something, we should go straight to them and say so. All reasonable requests would be granted.
So when I got to the experts' advice on children and money, I was excited. At last I would learn the truth about the allowance conundrum. Well, think again. Although most child-rearing gurus seem to agree that allowance is not a reward or a wage, they vary greatly on the issue of when and why to withhold allowance and on whether and how a parent should guide a child's way of spending it. One author counsels that while this money isn't a wage, you should revoke part of it if jobs around the house are neglected. You may also do so if grades decline. Others claim it should never be withheld. One guy suggests that the money be divided into fourths: immediate use, short-term savings, long-term savings (e.g., college), and charity. (Yikes!) Some see allowance as a "teaching tool," others as a concrete expression of respect for the child's independence.
Although I have always kept my nose above the rising tide of bills (if barely) and am, as of three years ago, paying a mortgage and supporting my family—I've even made a will and set money aside for the retirement I'm sure I'll never earn—at the core of my soul, I believe myself to be a financial cretin.
I am not opposed to capitalism, perhaps because I don't have to be. I am one of the rare and lucky individuals who, at least for the moment, can make a living from my art—essentially, the art of daydreaming. At make-believe, I'm apparently pretty darn good. If the most essential kind of allowance we were told to give our children were an imagination allowance, a teaching tool for make-believe, then I'd be the one giving the advice, not the one desperately seeking it.
Thinking about money and education always means revisiting my childhood. You're probably assuming that every time I wanted to buy a book or a candy bar, a Beatles album or a mood ring, I had to go to Mom or Dad. But after fifth grade, I rarely did. At age 10—two years younger than Alec is now—I started working in my local library. I'd cash my checks at my parents' bank and put the money in a tin box decorated with a photo of kittens.
Other than books and those mammoth jawbreaker gumballs, I bought very little; I loved watching my modest savings grow. Did I grow up to be a frugal, fiscally savvy young adult? No. I majored in art, moved to New York City, made next to nothing, and spent too much of it on art supplies, more books, and meals out with friends. I lived hand-to-mouth for nearly two decades, right through Alec's toddler years.
His father lived this way, too. Dennis is a photographer, and despite his working the hours of a corporate lawyer through most of our 17 years as a couple, his profit margin has always been slim. For 13 of those years, we lived together—like, on top of each other—in his small rent-stabilized apartment, where we stayed until Alec was 9 and Oliver 4. Between the two of us, somehow we paid the bills.
Then, five years ago, my first novel met with astonishing, unexpected success. Suddenly, I was earning more money than I needed to pay the bills. At first, I spent some of the surplus in extravagant ways: I had a few party dresses custom-made for the black-tie literary soirees to which we were suddenly invited. I bought my children eco-friendly toys from Vermont and tickets to upscale puppet shows. Dennis and I went out to dinner more often.
Recently, I've become somewhat more frugal—mainly because I pay that mortgage. But still, we do not budget. Money flows in and out of my bank account in quirky, unpredictable ways; I'm not sure I comprehend royalties much better than I understand hedge funds or the alternative minimum tax. But it's clear, nevertheless, that I'm the parent who will be the one to teach our children about money. (Can kids be sent away to money camp?)
One source of frustration for me is that because laws have changed to protect kids from exploitation through labor, there are no paid jobs for Alec like the one I had at my local library. I'm not even sure there's such a thing as a "paperboy" anymore, and he's too small to shovel snow.
In the quest to find out the "right" attitude toward allowance, I called the mother of Alec's best friend. She and her husband both work in finance. Yes, both of her sons receive an allowance, which they spend as they wish—how else do you learn how to handle money?—and it is unconnected to chores. Of course they must be reminded; what red-blooded boy remembers to take out the trash? "I talk about money whenever we buy something," she said. "I compare the relative cost of one thing to another, so they understand how different things are valued in this world."
