By Robin C. Harris
How do kids get pocket change these days? And how do they get their hands on substantially more?
Parents might dole it out as needed. Others give their kids nothing. Neither of these extremes is acceptable to me. As a foster parent, I was required to provide my kids with $3 to $5 a week, depending upon their age. (It’s probably higher than that today, or so I would hope.)
It was never enough — not because of their entitlement issues or greed; it just plain wasn’t enough. Five dollars didn’t go very far. I needed to up the ante, but there weren’t a lot of alternatives short of simply giving them more.
I discussed this with the kids, and their obvious solution was “Why don’t you pay us to do our chores?”
My single-minded evangelistic spin on this is that you don’t pay kids to do what they should do anyway as members of a family. That is abhorrent to me. My feelings about work are pretty much in line with those of Khalil Gibran who said, “Work is love made visible.” Work, I believe, must be treated as something honorable. Accordingly, I never assigned work as punishment, because to do so diminishes the honor of it. Not every kid in my care believed that work was a positive, but I certainly did. We needed to take chores out of the equation.
What we decided at this significant meeting was to cease calling them chores — a name no one liked, anyway. They would now be called “Daily Responsibilities,” and of course the kids would not be paid for performing them. These responsibilities included room cleaning, bed making, laundry sorting and folding, and various mealtime and kitchen jobs.
Chores were renamed, as well. They would now be called “Opportunities.” They would be moved to the weekend or any non-school day, they would be voluntary and they carried a monetary reward. Into this category fell all those jobs I wanted done, might have been obliged to hire someone to do, or was resigned to doing myself. A list of these would be posted on the bulletin board, along with the amount of money that could be earned. If more than one kid wanted one of these opportunities, and it was a big enough job to warrant it, they were allowed to split the work — and the money. If the job was done particularly well, it might carry a bonus.
Because I believe that work is an honor, a kid was not permitted to sign up for it if his responsibilities during the week were not satisfactorily carried out. Thus, the privilege of work was earned. One such job was painting the house, which went from beige to yellow with blue and white trim. Only Jeremy signed up for this one. The job took him four weekends, he was tremendously proud to have done it, and he let every visitor know that he did it. To have hired this done by a painter would have cost more than I was able to pay, and doing it myself had promised to be exhausting. Instead of either of those options, I paid Jeremy the minimum wage. I was happy and he was ecstatic.
Other opportunities such as yard work were, perhaps, less attractive and being smaller, they paid less money, but they did those jobs, and we stuck to the minimum wage. If I was not happy with the quality of their work, they had the option of shaping up or resigning. They also had the option of coming to me, suggesting a job that they felt needed doing and asking to do it.
Of course, kids can work outside the home. There are substantial benefits to this, especially if it falls into the category of entrepreneurship, but there are many caveats, and it is clearly a topic for another day.
Robin C. Harris, an 18-year resident of Lake County, is the author of “Journeys out of Darkness, Adventures in Foster Care.” A retired educator, he is a substitute teacher for Lake County schools and has recently completed two works of fiction for children and teens. He is available for tutoring in first through eighth grades. Harris can be contacted at harris.tke@att.net.
