Friday Thread: What is Going on With Kids' Allowance?

So many absolutely inutile piggy banks (I swear I had a relative of this one)

This week’s episode of

The Culture Study Podcast

was all about Sephora Teens, and one of our main points of discussion was where do the kids get the money to buy all this stuff? Elise Hu and I talked a bit about allowance in the ep, but I also thought the general concept of kids’ allowance would make a really useful and thought-provoking Friday Thread.

For most of my elementary years, I got two dollars a week — one dollar I could spend however I wanted (usually on baseball cards) and one dollar went into “savings.” And all of it was in cash, if not quarters. As I got older, I know my allowance grew, but my primary source of funds at that point was (cheap) babysitting. Allowance was for chores. It was also for being part of the family, and for figuring out how to both spend money and save it.

But now….who has cash! (My friend recently told me her kid’s allowance picky bank is filled with IOUs from taking the cash for other necessities — and that she also hasn’t paid allowance in 10 weeks). Is a debit card the best scenario? Isn’t that also somehow weird? But more importantly, what is allowance even FOR? If you make it contingent upon chores, does it somehow compromise the idea that we all do things to make this family work?

So let’s get into the philosophical and the nitty gritty. How did you and your parents or caregivers think of allowance, how do you think of it now, what are you actually paying, how has your thinking changed? If you don’t have kids, that doesn’t mean you can’t still be thinking about these ideas. If you do have kids, what are you working on when it comes to your kids and their understanding of money?

This prompt combines two things that are often hard to talk about (parenting AND money!) so please remember that people make different decisions in different scenarios in places with different norms; you might not agree with them but they are not doing it to injure you. That doesn’t mean we can’t ask questions, it just means, as always, that we can’t be butts about it.