When I was a kid, I did work hard for the money I earned. Not really. I was the youngest of six, so we had a lot of waste. Do you remember those little metal garbage cans they had back then? They didn’t hold a whole lot, so we had 5 of them.
In my neighborhood we had two garbage days too, which seems unheard of nowadays, and we needed both of them. Twice a week my Dad would give me $1 for each can I took out and brought in. $10 a week when you’re a little kid is a lot of money. Every garbage day I’d ride my Schwinn Trasher with cobra grips up to Cunio’s Pizza and Snappy Tomato Pizza to play video games. Mr. Do’s Wild Ride…Rolling Thunder…Gumshoe! I spent every dime of that $10 every week on video games, candy, soda, and Cunio’s garlic bread with cheese. Mmmmm. The best garlic bread I’ve ever had.
Even though $1 per can seems excessive in the 1980’s, I think it did help instill in me that if you do work, you get money. Not all work deserves money though. Some work is just doing what you need to do as part of a family.
As I grew older, my mom would pay me $5 a week to clean the bathrooms. By that time, taking out the garbage was just something I did. So was mowing the lawn. I remember my little 10 year old body trying to push the mower up the incline in our front yard and hoping that it didn’t topple over on the steep incline that met up with our neighbors driveway. The people that live there now were smart enough to put in a retaining wall.
While I didn’t really get into the workforce until I was 17, Christy has been working hard since she was 12. First delivering weekly ads with her cousin every week and then as a hostess/waitress/cook/everything else at Mio’s Pizzeria, where we met. She’s had a strong work ethic her entire life and knew that if you wanted something, you had to work for it.
We know some people that don’t give there kids any money for doing chores. Nothing. Zip. To me that sounds kind of like indentured servitude. We both think there are things that you do just because you are part of the family and you should help your parents out with things, but we also think there should be some tasks around the house that you should pay your children for so they learn the correlation between work and money.
From a young age we would make our kids clean up all their toys in the living room and their bedrooms. For all their hard work, they would get a whopping 50 cents. Which really isn’t bad if you think about it. That’s $15 a month for a 5 year old. But they are children and they didn’t really earn that much. Sometimes the day would get away from us and it was bedtime before we noticed the house was a mess and sometimes they just didn’t do a very good job. You don’t complete your job – you don’t get paid.
As our oldest two children became more capable, around 10 years old, we upped the chores, but really didn’t up the money too much. For their new chores, they get paid $20 a month, which they get the first day of each month as payment for the previous month. Their new set of chores consist of doing the family laundry (Christy folds everything except the clothes of the oldest two and I help whenever I realize I haven’t seen her for awhile and go in to find her folding), doing the dishes, cleaning the bathrooms, and taking out the garbage and recycling. For some reason Christy excluded the dishes on the weekend, so when the two oldest wanted me to get the Apple Music family plan so they could use it, I struck like a coiled rattlesnake at the opportunity for them to do the dishes on the weekends too and the music subscription would be part of their monthly pay. With this new plan and all of these children, I don’t expect that I’ll have to do any of those chores I mentioned for the next 15 years. Yessssss.
Aside from them learning the value of work = money, they are also learning life skills to turn them into self sufficient adults. When we first set out on this new monthly chores idea, one would do all the breakfast and lunch dishes and the other would do the dinner dishes. Every Sunday they swap. That way the same person doesn’t get stuck with all the dinner dishes every week. Since garbage and recycling are the same task, our daughter is responsible for all things recycling and our son takes out the trash.
At the beginning though, our daughter was ONLY doing laundry and our son was ONLY cleaning the bathrooms. They were content with their roles, but we didn’t want our son to grow up and not know where to put the detergent in a washer and our daughter not having the grit of having cleaned a toilet. We made the decision that the first weekend of every month, since they only do those chores on the weekends, the would swap those two chores.
Now they are on their way to being well rounded adults that can either live independently or be part of a team when they get in a relationship and can help share the burden of running a household.
Let us know how you handle chores in your house in the comments. Do you follow the same principles that we do and use them as a opportunity to teach your kids the work/money relationship or do you view all chores in the home as doing your part as a member of the household?