Lest you think I’m a monster, I meant that was an argument to allow unfettered hippo access!
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One other thought. Pipsqueak knows that we have 4 of her lovies. They used to get rotated but now one lives in the car, one lives at school, one lives at home, and one is available for rotation on laundry days.
Like @Bracken_Joy , it doesn’t leave the car so we don’t lose any so we’re not taking it to the park.for example, just in our own environments.
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Cuckoo knows there are 2 and will try anything to find another and briefly possess 2 hippos. She does not know there are actually 3!
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We’ve gone back and forth on this issue as well. D1 has “hop hop” and that little bunny lovey has been her snuggle object since 6 months old. We actually had 2 but she always knew the difference between them and only the “right” one was acceptable. She still uses it to sleep and as a comfort object to self soothe. She also has this extreme impulse to suck her thumb if hop hop is in her hands. Like, she will spin it around until the right section is in her hand the right way and then shove her thumb in her mouth and breathe in deeply smelling hop hop at the same time. She does it as soon as hop hop is in her hands.
Around 3-ish we started saying that hop hop was for sleeping only and trying to get her to keep it in her bed, unless she was upset and needed it for soothing. This was mostly as an attempt to try and curb the thumb sucking. When we see it out and about laying around the house we still encourage her to put it back in her bed, so it will be there when it is bed time. She takes it to school with her every day for nap time as well.
We eventually made a decision with her doctors and the child development specialist that we would not do anything to prevent her from sucking her thumb. We still verbally remind her during the day if she just does it out of habit and we offer her a chewy thing instead, but we are not doing anything to prevent thumb sucking as a soothing technique. The biggest issue with it is requiring braces, and lots of kids who never suck their thumbs need braces anyway!
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On thumb sucking and braces: I’ve had multiple rounds of braces for jaw issues but never sucked my thumb. Pipsqueak’s dentist said at her 3.5 year appointment that he was seeing changes in her bite and it was time to stop. My orthodontist (I’m currently in another round of braces lol) said he never made his kids stop and he didn’t think it was a big deal. Pipsqueak had heard her dentist say no more thumb sucking though and was very motivated to stop.
FWIW we used the Tguard and it was a really positive experience for everyone. It’s silicone and I still have it so if anyone else wants to use it let me know and I can mail it to you for much less than the $50 it costs new! The first couple nights were hard emotionally because it was hard for her to fall asleep without thumb sucking but she never complained that the guard was uncomfortable and after that it was smooth sailing.
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How do yall do allowance? And what age did you start?
When I was growing up we got our age per week but we had to divide the money evenly into 3 categories: spend, save, and invest. We had to do this with all of our earned money too but gifts could be split between spend and save. We probably started around 5-6. My parents would always buy the off brand school supplies and we had to spend our own money if we wanted to “upgrade” to name brand stuff. If we wanted the chocolate bar in the checkout line we would have to use our own money. The invest category was taken out every year on our birthday and put into mutual funds and I got this when I turned 18 (around $5k that I put in an IRA).
Chores were not tied to allowance unless it was something above and beyond we got paid for. The logic was chores are not optional so tying the money to chores wasn’t how we did it.
I want to do something similar but I’m curious on how to improve what my parents did for us.
I also realize how much work it was for my parents to do this weekly and always have the right denomination of cash. I also wonder if $/age still makes sense 30 years later. When I was 6, I got $6/week. When I was 15 I got $15/week.
So how are yall doing it? What has changed since you started it?
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I have been having similar thoughts about the pacifier. As soon as she’s been able to talk she is obsessed with having it at bedtime and naptime. She’s not running around with it all day (although she does sneakily sometimes grab it from her crib when I’m not looking). I assumed I’d need to stop when she turns 2, and now that that’s around the corner I am sad about it. It makes the whole bedtime routine SO easy because she knows that’s where she gets her “soothie.”
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Our dentist told us to wean off the pacifier by 15 months, which is around the corner for us - also not excited about it! Poor guy loves his bapa.
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Yeah! I’m thinking I need to think of a shiny substitute, like a special nightlight or something.
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Following because I don’t know either.
My kids have received “red envelopes” with money from my parents and some of their friends. I don’t know what to do with it. I’ve already lost* some of them and I don’t know who each envelope belongs to.
*I mean, not lost like gone, but the money is somewhere in the house I don’t know where.
This year in TK I’ve had to send money in for the book fair and for their holiday market, but the 5 year old is still fuzzy on the concept of money. Part of that is that he’s never seen us pull out cash to pay for anything so it’s confusing.
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I’ve been thinking very similar allowance thoughts, on many fronts. I’m planning to start on Larva’s 5th birthday (one of which gifts will include a compartmentalized money bank with save, spend, donate, invest sections), $1 of age per week. She hasn’t gotten birthday or holiday money yet, so I’m undecided there, as well as what “counts” for her needing to spend her own money vs. me getting it for her. (Like, I’d rather get Crayola than Cra-Z-Art anyway, but maybe if she wants to buy a candy at the grocery store? Buying presents for friends birthdays?)
I recently informed her that she had no money (because she was saying she was going to be the grown up and pay the restaurant bill) and she was completely floored by the idea, lol! So the thought is now percolating somewhat, and she is getting a wallet for Christmas to carry her new library card, so might as well start giving her the coins change on the rare days I use cash.
Which I don’t (use cash), so I’ll probably treat it like an annual expense in my budget and get the right amount in bills and coins ahead of time to put away somewhere and dole out to her on schedule.
Likewise it will be decoupled from chores, which are expectations for being part of a household, but she could either a) earn extra for doing additional, irregular help for me or other family, friends, community, or b) have to pay out for anything that gets broken in her care (which isn’t something we’ve had to deal with, but my brother definitely spent part of his childhood earning money to replace friends’ toys he broke).
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I never got an allowance and it literally never even occurred to me to give one to my children. Dang. Now I gotta think about this!!
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I don’t remember what age I started. Maybe eight? Maybe seven? I’m sure I had the intention for a year before we started. Kiddo gets paid for chores (in theory, see below) but then there’s other stuff he’s just expected to do which is not considered to be chores.
Chores: Vacuuming with the stick vac, dusting, putting clean laundry away, etc. I can find the whole list if it would be helpful.
Not chores: wiping the table after dinner, putting dirty laundry in the hamper, etc.
If he didn’t do his chores he just didn’t get paid. Turns out my kid didn’t give a rats ass about money, it was supposed to be paid out weekly but no one remembered most weeks so I tried to pay him immediately when he completed the chore but then he’d put the money down somewhere in the house even when directed to immediately put it into his piggie bank.
We don’t do anything age related because I didn’t want him accumulating a lot of money and then blowing it on something stupid. He doesn’t have the attention span for spend/save/give and it would’ve made the system a lot more complicated for us in terms of keeping around enough denominations and getting a special three-spot piggie bank. He’s started getting some at birthday/Christmas so he’s has spending money for a $40 Miles Morales costume this summer and a $40 Beyblade set a month or two ago. None of that was from chore money.
If I had more spoons to deal with the “death by a thousand cuts” response to making him do a chore maybe things would be different, but I don’t. School, activities, and homework sucks up too much time and mental bandwidth as it is. Next year he turns ten, I need to start mentally preparing to be more strict about him doing chores then and actually sticking to it.
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I’m truly trying to sort this out as well. Right now eldest is 6 and we don’t have an allowance. She does end up with random money from birthdays, Christmas, the tooth fairy and when she randomly convinced my brother that he should give her a dollar.
She is understanding how this money works though! When we go to the store and she randomly wants a toy or art thing that I’m not buying I dont say no. I tell her that she ca use her money and buy it. She asked how much it costs and determines if it’s worth it to her. It has cut down a ton on the I want xyz at the store.
Eta I do want to figure out some sort of app for allowance since truly that’s how money works now. I just haven’t done enough research yet. So if anyone has a suggestion I would love to know!
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My boys get 1 dollar per year of age but only every OTHER week. They do, however, get more by taking on extra chores (a set amount is not negotiable) and BB, who is 13, gets an extra like $30/month clothing allowance.
I do not do formal savings- I mean to but it didn’t work out- but they don’t routinely spend it all. I hand out cash only on an as needed basis. Normally I pay with a credit card and take it out of their account, which is a piece of paper on the fridge.
This is the reality after like 7 years of allowance. Not necessarily what I intended. We do set aside 1 dollar each time for “give” and when it adds up to a certain amount, they choose where to donate it. Examples include the sarcoma research foundation requested by the late great Technoblade and Mr. Beast’s “Team Seas” but also things like Toys for Tots and local homeless organizations.
They buy their own add ons (eg, if they want more Costco lunch than I budgeted for), gadgets, little things like that. Video games.
LB had been sinking most of his allowance into his Roblox account and then he traded it away to a scammer that he thought was a virtual friend. (I did not realize the social media potential of the platform.) Though painful, I hope this is the reality check that means he never sends a nude photo to someone he’s never met in real life or gets scammed on a larger scale.
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Having done no more research than possible in the last 5 minutes, Bomad might be a possibility.
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Would anyone in the US like these onesie extenders? I can mail them. Assorted sizes. I didn’t get any takers in Buy Nothing.
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Hi! Yes!
Our kids get Eidi and we make sure they spend some and we try to keep track but always lose track/mix it with ours.
So piggy banks this Christmas (5,2) for any money they get, allowance later and not tied to chores or saving but encouraged to save up for bigger wants and later to save for long term.
I think there were very few years I got an allowance. Maybe 8-10? By 10 my brother had a paper route, by 14 we both had jobs. Clothes etc were a mix of bought for us, buying with our own money, buying with parents and being given $x to buy clothes. Our money was mainly for wants. Craft supplies were stocked up at back to school and by gifts, so in between would be on us.
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When my kids were little, we did the dollar-per-age thing. I don’t remember when we started it. Like five at the youngest maybe? At a certain point, I just ended that and raised it for both of them and made it the same. I remember watching them work things out about money and they were being super generous with each other and cooperative and I just thought it was so great, I wanted to be nice to them. I think they were around 8 and 11 when this happened. We used to do cash but that got old. So then it was more of a ledger thing. I wasn’t too good about keeping track and neither were they. Son almost never spends any money and Daughter loves and wants and needs everything under the sun. So now I pretty much say yes to whatever Son asks for and for a while I sometimes said no to Daughter. But now she earns money on her own and gets to decide for herself. She’s 17.
Officially, she still gets an allowance but no one has tracked that for a long time. They both have my credit card in their phones. They are not to use it without permission. They don’t. except now Daughter does because she makes her own decisions and she pays for everything with my credit card and then pays me back through venmo. I like it this way because I still get to see what she’s buying and for how much, and I collect the points. I also recently added Daughter as a cardholder on one of my credit cards. So she has a card in her name. I guess there’s a lot of trust there.
Sorry if the teenager way of doing things isn’t much applicable. If I didn’t trust them with my credit card and still actually gave them their allowance, I’d probably just do it through apple cash. But I guess that requires being an apple family as well. And, having kids who are old enough to have phones.
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I read the book “the opposite of spoiled” and got a lot from it, similar ideas on the nuts and bolts as the not tied to chores, and encouraging charity etc. I’ll give it a re read this year and probably implement allowance around 6 for Latte, along with formalizing her chore expectations (right now it’s piecemeal as she wants to help, not many standing expectations).
She has earned money for doing studies though, and I’ve taken her to target and let her choose what to buy, talked through options etc. the thing she really wanted one time (pink sequin unicorn backpack) was $2 more than she had, so I told her she could help me vacuum the back of the car to earn the other $2. I probably should have made her do that FIRST then came back because that became a power struggle, but my kid will also burn the fucking world down over a power struggle about a quesadilla so 
I wasn’t too surprised.
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