METHOD
Create money and assign it some value. Hand it out when your child completes a task. Let your child cash it in later for a prize.WHAT IT TEACHES
A child's work has value.When I first heard about the idea of rewarding labor with household currency, I immediately liked it. It seemed less crass, somehow, than paying kids real money for work.
"We're going to have Joeydollars," I said to my son one night, "and you're going to earn them for doing work--especially for feeding Edward and changing his water and stuff." Edward is Joey's guinea pig. Edward does no work either, but guinea pigs are so low on the food chain that they view accomplishment in negative terms. Not getting eaten is a huge deal, the equivalent of single-handedly building a suspension bridge.
"No way," said Joey.
I went upstairs, turned on the PC, and tried to master the PowerPoint feature so that I could design and print bills. This took roughly three hours, but I wound up with a very satisfying line of currency in many different colors. Unfortunately, by the time I'd finished, everybody had gone to bed, and I had to take care of Edward.
Two days passed, during which time Joey showed no interest in earning Joeydollars. Then he saw some beautiful marbles. I said I would buy them and hold them in escrow until he earned enough Joeydollars--250--to cover the cost.
He proceeded to work like a maniac, feeding Edward and cleaning his cage. Then he began to think up other tasks, unbidden.
"Should I put the vacuum cleaner away?" he asked.
"No," I said.
"It looks dirty under the stove. Should I try to clean up under there?"
"No! Look, the idea is not to earn 250 Joeydollars in two days. It's to earn maybe 40 or 50 a day until you get there."
Suffice it to say that when he'd acquired enough points to get the marbles, he abruptly lost interest in doing chores and took an unpaid leave of absence.
"Oh, you're doing those," said a friend who visited a few days later, when he noticed a stray Joeydollar lying around. "I tried all those systems when my kids were younger."
"And?"
"I found that each one works for about three days."
This is sort of true. On the up side, I am under consideration for the contract to redesign the rufiyaa, the currency of the Maldives.
WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY
It can be dangerous to start paying your children for every little thing they do to help out. Not only is it expensive, as they eventually demand more and more, but also it fails to establish "helping out" as a basic value for which you shouldn't always get paid. Even though some experts support the idea of paying children for certain chores, they all said kids should do some of their work gratis and shouldn't fall into the habit of angling for a fee when work comes up spontaneously. "I don't pay my kids for helping me bring in the groceries," says David Dudley, a psychologist and director of the Counseling Center at La Sierra University in Riverside, California.
