What Ana Does

I struggled a lot with household chores for the kids, allowances and money. I read a few parenting books about allowances and listened to some parenting experts, hoping to land on something that felt right for my house and kids. ( Here's a book on that subject I didn't agree with. )  But with quarantine and everyone being HOME, I really had to find something that would work. Because if it was just ME AND DAVID putting away dishes every day, I was going to lose it.  For a few years, we've been working on this clipboard of chores, where I had listed chores and how much they paid out, but there was room to add and negotiate price. Alice got especially good a bartering. And I was good about paying immediately for awhile, but eventually we started to list "I Owe Yous" to the girls and it got a little meaningless. As you know, I'm not good with consistency.  But while home, we figured out if we added up the money on the chalkboard, we could keep track of what they w...

I'm currently listening to this audiobook: The Opposite of Spoiled by Ron Lieber. And, full disclosure, I'm not in love with it. I'm not jibbing with his position on a lot of these money issues. But its got me thinking about how I'm teaching my kids about money in the real world. Leah has been asking about an allowance and what she'll have to do to earn it for years. And the question stumps us. I didn't get an allowance growing up. But we were encouraged to get jobs and babysit as soon as possible. There wasn't a lot of extra money for new Gap shirts or trendy jeans, so if I wanted to not live in my sister's hand-me-downs, I'd have to buy them myself. And I especially don't remember earning money for doing regular chores around the house. We did them because we had to, we'd be threatened with a wooden spoon (to clean my room, which I hated to do) or, eventually, because we wanted our house to look nice. The author of this book is no...