Give Allowance at the End of Your Family Meeting

Life can seem so busy and everyone in a family has different schedules. This makes having a family meeting very challenging. However, unless connection and discussion time is made a priority, the distance between family members will increase and parental influence will decrease. You’ll be running after problems rather than proactively solving problems.

So, make a family meeting a priority. It just takes you insisting that you have them regularly. An incentive that I learned about from Michael Popkin, PhD., that worked was to give allowance to Jen at the end of the meeting as long as she participated. We kept a form where our daughter wrote down the date and amount of money she received, then initialed it. It was a simple way to teach Jen about keeping track of important information for future reference.

I encourage parents to give their children allowance to teach the value of money.

Some parents have the children divide their money up between savings, spending, and donating.
Others, give allowance so kids will learn to spend money themselves rather than asking for money.
Depending on their age, they can spend their own money on such things as toys, movies, or makeup.

A key point is that allowance is not connected to chores so it is never taken away if chores are not done.

Use effective director strategies instead to gain cooperation. The problem of paying children for chores, is that they learn that they should always be paid and will start asking, “How much will you pay me?” whenever you request their help. Then, parents get upset at their kids for always wanting to get paid. You set up the problem yourself so you can fix it.

If you are linking allowance to chores now, tell your kids that you are changing the plan. Before you do though, make sure you have learned effective director strategies such as the After-Then strategy or the It’s Time strategy. I offer you the roadmap to successfully winning cooperation in my book, Ally Parenting: A Non-Adversarial Approach to Transform Conflict Into Cooperation.

We had family meetings for 10 years even though there were only three of us. Have a treat after, such as having fun or eating popcorn.

Here is a quick outline of how to have a Family Meeting. Enjoy your time together.

What is quickest way to create harmony with family? A: Family meetings.