Weekly Allowance for 12 and 14 year olds

From my perspective (parent of 14 year old), you should NOT tie allowance to chores. The reason is that at some point, there will be a negotiation. I don't care that you don't give me $$, I won't do this or that. I think I should get more money for that. How come little sibling only has to do this and I have to do that? Chores are what you do because you are a member of this household and therefore contribute to the betterment of this household. You can't work and earn money yet, so we cover your rent and food--you do these chores. I tie chores to free time. You can't have free time until you complete these chores. I make sure the chores are age appropriate, and to start, I make sure they are very short and doable. Empty the dishwasher and then you can have free time, for example. Today, my kid is at home alone and I've left him a list of chores. He can get them done whenever he wants during the day, as long as they are done by the time I get home. And, since this is expected behavior, I have no doubt when I get home the list will be done. It's about 20 minutes worth of stuff. So, my kids get an allowance no matter what. But, they also (pretty happily) do all the chores I assign them. I am very careful not to make the mistakes of: oh! you did that quick, so now I assign you this too. I also make some of them their responsibility like their laundry. They do that or they don't have clean clothes. Their bathroom. They do that, or they have an illness pit that is not OK. Also--don't tie allowance to grades!

My kids are 12 and 13. I give them their age in cash weekly. I do not tie it to chores, I never "dock" their allowance. They learn how to manage their money and if they blow it, they blow it. They both save money for things they want. It's worked well. (After doing much research.)

My son is 15, so I give him $15/week, which is divided like this: $7 in his checking account, $7 in savings account, $1in the charity jar. He is free to spend the checking money however he wants. The savings account is for big ticket items, so he needs to ask permission before dipping into it, and he decides when and where to donate from the charity jar. He complained that $7/week spending money was not much, which is true, so he gets double allowance any week that he has $25 or more in his checking account. He almost never does, so that ended up being a moot point. It sounds like your kids are less complicated than mine, so you can probably use a simpler system. This works great for us, though.

As for chores, I don’t pay for them. He has regular chores that he has to do independent of allowance, because that’s just part of being in a family.

Good luck!

Good Question!  There are many different approaches to the allowance / chore dilemma. The New York Times or Wall Street Journal devoted many pages to the topic a couple of years ago.  I think the best advice is to take an approach that aligns with your values and be consistent with it.

That said, here's what we do (my children are now 16 and 18):

Basic chores are expected as part of being in a family and are not tied to allowance. This includes things like helping with meal prep and clean up, keeping the house tidy, cleaning their rooms, and, now that they are teens, doing their laundry. My husband and I pay for basic necessities and occasional splurges on our discretion. While they were in middle school, the kids received a weekly allowance of $1 for every year of age.  Now that they are in high school they get a set amount per week to spend as they please - meals out and activities with friends, make-up for my daughter, etc. The 16yo gets $20, the 18yo still in high school gets $30. Neither of them drive, so both are provided a transit card and Lyft account tied to my credit card only for parent approved rides.  I also provide mobile phone service with a limited data plan.  Any additional money they would like, they earn through summer jobs, pet sitting, extra jobs around the house (cleaning the solar panels, specific gardening projects, vacuuming and washing the car, etc.).  My rate for extra jobs is the same as what they would earn at a place like Starbucks or Jamba Juice - currently $13/hr.

My goal through this is to remove me from being arbiter of their spending and help them learn financial management.

Good luck finding what works for you and your family!

I have a fifteen year old son and he gets $15 per week.  This is based on his age:  $1 for every year.  

He does have a set of weekly chores that he is required to do, mostly on weekends.  It includes taking out the garbages on garbage day and rolling the cans to the curb, mowing the lawn, picking up the dog alley, etc.  These are "knowns" that he must do every week.  On our family whiteboard, I also have a running list of other chores that he needs to do - more occational things to help out or a kid "honey do" list.  These chores include washing the car, trimming hedges, helping with large garden projects (ie, weeding the side yard).  There are things I just ask him verbally to do on the fly, such as feeding the dogs, unloading the dishwasher or folding the laundry while I do something else like make dinner. 

I'm going to pat myself on the back a little here and note that he does all of the above without too much complaint (he is a teenager, after all....) because he's always been expected to pitch in and help out in age-appropriate ways.  

One thing to think about:  I hate assembling things or getting new electronics (phone, garage door opener, etc.) running, but my son loves that kind of stuff.  Those, too, have become his defacto chores, but he perceives it as a fun task.  Could you work with your boys on what they like to do and build a list from there?

Hi there,

 For the past 2 years, I've "hired" my son to do work (not chores) around our house. What is the difference? I might say "I need shredding done or the car washed and this is what I'll pay." We sometimes negotiate the fee.  I give him specific instructions on what I'd like to see in the finished product. He gets feedback on how they were completed. The goal is that he learns to do tasks as instructed, not as he sees fit or feels they should be done. And yes, I've deducted his pay if he's done a poor job on the task. It's the beginning of a real world learning experience that I'm trying to get him to "feel" so that he can be successful in a real work setting.  In addition we talk about what it means to be in the workforce today and expectations of the employer.  In closing, I'd say setup the list of chores, add in some expectations, do some evaluation after the task has been completed, and pay accordingly.  Believe me, the "outside real world" will thank you for doing this.

Keep it real mom of teenager

I did not assign any chores to my children and gave them a fixed weekly amount. During high school, I tied it to their school performance, e.g., the dollar amount would be equivalent to the SAT score minus 2000.

My 13 year old get $10 a week. For that he needs to do the following every day: clean his room, put away the dishes from dishwasher and from the strainer, take out the recycling. Once a week he needs to fold his washed clothes and wheel the garbage bins out to the curb and back in again.

I give both my kids $10 per week. I do pay for movies and such much of the time in addition to the $10.  Just yesterday I shelled out $50 for Waterworld. (That's insane that it costs that much!!) My kids do the same chores daily/weekly: rake the leaves, take out garbage and recycling, load/empty dishwasher, set/clear the table, clean their rooms, do their own laundry, pick up the oranges from the ground under the tree. And each one of them makes dinner 1x per week. (this is a struggle.... ok, it really only happens 2x per month but we are working on it. the plan is once a week eventually). They are 11 and 15. 

We don't pay for chores.  Our kids are expected to handle their share of the household work just because they are members of the household. Each of them has just one or two regular sole responsibilities (fix dinner 1x/week, take trash bins to curb for pickup) and otherwise are just expected to step in as appropriate to do things like empty the dishwasher when it's clean.  This would be true whether we gave them an allowance or not.  From time to time I will offer to pay for something out of the ordinary, but only when it's a truly optional job, and something that I consider worth paying for so that I don't have to do it myself!  The amount of time that kids "should" spend on household chores really varies depending on all sorts of things about their particular family's life, so I wouldn't worry too much about what other teens do and instead consider what chores need to be done in your house (what are you doing now that you'd really like *not* to do? what things are going undone because nobody ever gets to them?), and what else your kids spend their time on (do they have activities or commitments that, combined with school, take up most of their day, or are they sitting around staring at their phones for hours after school? what's your family's typical weekend like?).  

We give our kids an allowance in order to teach them about managing their money (and allow them to make mistakes with it while the stakes are low!).  It's called an "allowance" for a reason; it's not wages, but a set amount that they are allowed to control.  And the amount is more or less the amount we would otherwise be spending on discretionary items for them anyway - books, lunches, outings with friends - which number will of course be different for each family depending on their financial situation.  They can choose to spend it, save it, donate it, totally in their own discretion, but we expect them to pay for more things themselves now, as teenagers, than we did when they were kindergarteners (and their allowance is accordingly higher).  I have one who lets money flow through his fingers like water, but I don't rescue him if he can't buy lunch at his favorite cafe this week due to having spent his entire allowance on computer games!  There's food at home.

Both kids have "teen checking" bank accounts and their allowance is automatically transferred from my account to theirs monthly.  This is a lot easier for all concerned than weekly cash.  When they were younger their accounts were savings accounts, so they didn't have debit cards and I sometimes had to withdraw cash for them to spend, or buy things for them and then reimburse myself via account transfer, but otherwise it worked the same way.

We give our kids $1/week per year of age for allowance, with 50% deposited to their debit card and 50% into a savings account, with the idea that they have to save half of what they get.  We did not tie the allowance to chores. That might be a good idea however, but there are several philosophies about that. One is that that kids are members of the household and everyone needs to contribute to the household work.  Otherwise how would you respond to a kid who decided he/she doesn't need money so can refuse to help out with the household work?  And that the purpose of giving children some money is to help them learn to manage money.  Our son is 16 and he gets $16/wk, with $8 transferred to each his debit account and saving account.  If he does extra household work, yard work, washing a car, power washing the steps, etc. we might pay him, but I prefer that he see it as a way of being helpful and generous with his contribution to the family, as we are to him with so many of things we do for him.  Some research has shown that if kids aren't paid for things (check out the books by Alfie Kohn), they can actually be more intrinsically motivated to help out. On the other hand, when I was growing up, I got allowance based the requirement to do certain chores (make my bed in the mornings and wash dinner dishes and was "docked" if I didn't do those things). 

For our daughter, we did $1 per week for her age. When she was 15, she took over cleaning the house, and we paid her $125 a week for that. She graduated from college last year. She is diligent about saving, and started funding her Roth IRA. 

I thought I would add my response because my approach to money was completely different and things worked out fine. I never gave an allowance. If they needed money to do something, they came to me and asked and I decided if I would fund the movie, clothes, or whatever. This was fine until they got to be 13 or 14. At that point we started fighting too much about money and how it was spent. I totally gave in. I signed them on to my credit card, and told them that they had $1,000/year to spend on clothes and entertainment. They used the credit card for going out to eat, buying gifts for friends, movies, clothes, etc. They were so thankful for the freedom that they kept very careful accounting of how much they spent. And, as a bonus, they developed a credit score and an understanding of budgeting. 

I heard an author on the radio discuss his ideas about kids and money and it worked REALLY well with my daughter (now 19) and is still a work in progress with my son (14 and much more impulsive and desirous in general than his sister). This author suggested that: if you are the kind of parent who buys their child nicer clothes, brand names, etc, you should give them an amount in allowance that would enable them to make these purchases themselves. Thereby, they learn to budget. Beginning in 9th grade, I gave her a total amount for 6 months and told her to spend it for going out to eat, buying clothes, etc and I would pay for basics (underwear, shampoo, food). I couldn't believe that within a few months I heard her exclaim- "That t shirt is $50? I'll wait until it goes on sale!" Words that had never come out of her mouth before. I tried this on a month to month basis with my son in 7th grade but he was either too young and/or too impulsive. He was constantly trying to borrow from the next month. I'm trying a modified version with him as he enters 9th grade. Hoping it works!