Tornado Boy gathering his $4 from his bank
Proudly displaying his new Zhu Zhu pet that he helped pay for.
Carefully building a Zhu Zhu house
Learning that his hampster is stronger than he thought.
Tornado Boy is in love. Her name is “Nugget”. After a few weeks of begging (very unusual behavior for him), I relented and let Tornado Boy pick out a Zhu Zhu pet when we saw them in stock today. Since it wasn’t a purchase that I planned to make today, I hadn’t had him get out his money in advance of our shopping trip. I had told him that he needed to save up $4 for a hamster. I could have sworn these things were $7.99 around Christmas time. They’ve gone up to $10, but I didn’t penalize him because I had already told him what his contribution would be. I made him keep it in the packaging until we got home and he could pay for his purchase. I don’t know when I’ve seen him more excited about something. I’m not sure how long his excitement will last, but he’s a very happy boy today and Nugget got a big kiss before bedtime.
My Father-in-law is the one who taught me about the 50% rule. He implemented it when my husband and his brother were kids as a way to make sure that they had a vested interest in their large-ticket purchases. He found that they became much more selective about what they wanted, and that they took better care of the items that they had saved up for. I thought this made a lot of sense and was a brilliant way to teach kids about saving, caring for and valuing their toys.
Up to now, Tornado Boy has had a piggy bank, but we really used it mostly as a learning tool to help teach him about coins – which was which and how much they were worth. We’d put our loose change in it most nights and have him help us by identifying the coins and seeing what was in there. Once it got full, we’d change it out at the Coinstar machine for gift certificates (no fee that way).
We are not giving Tornado Boy an allowance yet. We’re trying to balance the fact that the child is a part of the family and has some basic expectations about how they contribute to the family. Typically, Tornado Boy’s “chores” consist of things like clearing his plate from the table, putting his dirty clothes in the hamper, folding some small towels and cleaning up his own toys. For this particular venture, I paid him to do “extra” or new chores. He did things like help me put away laundry, helping clear out some old plants in the yard and putting away some of the silverware from the dishwasher. He was very excited and asked to help with “my chores”. It was nice to see him really understanding that he was working towards something, rather than just having it be given to him.
I’m not sure when we’ll start giving Tornado Boy an allowance. One of the things that I’m most interested in is seeing if rewarding him can help him to focus and listen better. I’ve got an old Melissa and Doug reward chart that I probably should dig out. It might be worth more to us rewarding good behavior rather than trying to “create” chores for him to do at this point. We’ll see. It is nice to have him understanding the concepts of saving towards an item and contributing to it.
TB looks so very pleased with his pet. I am very curious to see how long it will last. My husband and I had a lot of discussions lately about reward system, and we also have some of the same concerns about paying for something that should be part of family responsibilities. I had more or less “loose change” allowance as well until I was big enough to become responsible for recycling. My husband had fixed allowance that was not tied to any sort of performance. In general daughter never expressed any desire for an object so far except for sweets