Tribe talk: Pocket money incentives
Posted on: 14/06/2011
When I last talked about the kids, I was saying how helpful they were when we were camping.
Amazingly, oldest one is now being even more helpful than that. Let me explain why.
A while back, I got fed up with nobody helping at all, so did pocket money on a new system. They have a book. Each time they do a chore, they earn 10p, and I write it in their book.
We went a while with nobody earning anything much. I hadn’t been to the toy shop, which meant they hadn’t been lured by the vivid shades of plastic to want to save up for anything.
Then, late last week, oldest one got fed up with never being allowed to use mine or loved one’s computer when he wanted to, so he decided that it was time to earn lots of pocket money to get himself one. After taking a moment to digest this rather dramatic U-turn, I talked it over with him, pointing out that he would have to do about ten chores a day for the best part of a year before it could be his (not to mention rules about appropriate times to use the computer, even if it was his). He was still determined.
We haven’t managed ten chores on most days, but he is being extremely helpful nevertheless. I rather like it. I hope it lasts and he doesn’t get fed up with it. All this help will be worth the price of a new netbook, as well as sneaking some real-life lessons in while I’m at it. I’m going out of my way not to do stuff so he can do it when he gets home from school. Utterly fabulous.
Long live bribery.
braindribbles 
14/06/2011 at 3:51 pm
Impressive! Long may it continue!
Bea would love to do jobs for money, but I won’t let her yet because she does them really badly (meaning they typically need redoing).
15/06/2011 at 11:19 am
Strangely, Peter is slow but he generally does a good job, thankfully!
17/06/2011 at 11:09 am
My mum had this problem with me, but she’d then make me redo and redo the job until it met her standards, or else not get paid. I always complied, I guess because I figured that having invested one bunch of time and potentially not getting paid at all for it, I might as well put in the extra time even though it was poor value.
After a while I got to doing the jobs properly the first time…