By uss_dad
As long as the money is yours, the respect part will most likely be a long-time in coming! Here’s a short story that helps to illustrate this very important point.
Several years ago, we were embarking on a summer vacation trip to just outside of Bend, Oregon. We had made similar trips many times before since Linda is from Oregon. Several hundred miles before we got to the house that we were going to rent for the week, one of our college-aged sons started petitioning me that we needed to rent bikes as soon as we arrived for the many miles of bike trails around this resort area. I replied that these homes always have a good selection of bikes and that we should wait to see what kind of bikes were available at the house before we rushed out and rented others. That perspective was not that warmly received and I sensed that there was more of this attitude potentially ahead of me for the week. (I have always been amazed how smart the kids get once they go away to college!)
As soon as we got to the house, I queried Linda about my plan and she agreed. I rounded up all 4 kids and announced to them that I was giving each of them x-dollars for the week. They could spend it any way that they wanted to, but no more money was coming from dear ole dad. They could use the money to rent bikes, go canoeing, or whatever.
What happened thereafter was remarkable!
My son did go down and rent a bike for himself, but he rented the most inexpensive bike that they had, and further negotiated with the store owner to rent the bike for 2 ½ days rather than 3. All in all, the kids had a great time that week and they came back home with most of the cash that I had given them still in their pockets!
The simple difference was that my arrangement made the money their money instead of dad’s money.
Once your kids are old enough to earn their own money, you should take every opportunity to have them bear a significant cost-portion for discretionary items that they want you to buy for them. We frequently went 50-50 on things that we agreed were worth purchasing, but the kids bore the entire cost for completely frivolous items like computer games. For popular games that the kids really wanted, they frequently pooled their money together in order to purchase the game. Oh, the power of teamwork, and the subject of a future posting no doubt!
