Deus Ex Blog

I had an idea today about how to teach children the value of money.  It came to me as I was pondering how I learned not to desire useless junk as a child and how certain of the other children around me never did.  Whenever we went on vacation, my parents would buy me a souvenir of some sort.  Whenever I got my souvenir, I was invariably disappointed when it would break or I would lose interest soon after I got it.  (The one that stands out the most was when I got a plastic bow and arrow at a tourist trap that broke after about ten minutes of playing with it.)  Over time I realized that those kinds of things just weren’t worth the investment, even if I wasn’t the one paying for it and I stopped begging my parents for things (or at least started begging them for fewer, more expensive things.)  Many of the kids around me never got that lesson and simply had to have as much useless junk as they could talk, whine, or cajole their parents into buying for them.  So here’s my idea:

For anything that we buy for our kids beyond basic necessities, we take how much we spent and divide it by our hourly wage.  If we are making $15/hour say and our kid desperately wants something that is $30, the kid will have to do two hours of “Work”.  Work will consist of chores (as soon as they are old enough to do them) or sitting in a designated area and doing productive things like reading a book, writing, doing extra homework, that sort of thing.  Once they have completed the proscribed duration of work, they can have their purchase.  We may get a raw deal as parents if our kids actually enjoy doing those things, but hopefully having to sit still for a while and work instead of playing will teach them that you have to work for stuff and that spending two hours working to pay for something that they lose interest in after half an hour isn’t a sound investment.

Of course, it’ll be a few years at least before we even start having kids, and then it’ll be a few more years before they’re able to comprehend these kinds of things, but it’s a thought.