Pocket money

[harknesswitch]

My dd is 13 and overall a polite, sensible girl who's doing well at school and has coped with lockdown really well.

At the moment I don't give her any pocket money. But she does get her mobile phone paid for, £20 a month, and she would go horse riding every other week (Covid permitting), which was £25 a lesson. She doesn't really want for much, we bought her a laptop for her birthday and she gets clothes and make up for Xmas and birthdays. She doesn't really ask for anything over and above that.

I'm aware she's not really had any experience of managing her own money.

I was thinking about giving her the child benefit i receive, and she can use that for her horse riding, and any none school clothes, or 'stuff' she wants. It works out to be about £21 a week.

Is that too much?

There was a thread about this the other day:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/_chat/4201326-Teenagers-renegotiating-allowance

But in summary it depends how much money you have to give and what you expect them to spend it on!

Thank you @UserTwice

When I was a kid (way back in the 1950s) we were expected to earn our pocket money/allowance or whatever you call it.

Every week my mother pinned a list of jobs up on the cupboard door and each job had a price. As you did your chores you ticked them off the sheet. If you didn't do all the jobs then you didn't get all your pocket money. In addition my sis and I were expected to keep our shared bedroom clean and tidy and to run errands to the shops for our parents or an elderly neighbor. We were also taught to save and budget for what we wanted. There was little money to spare in those days (still food rationing in the early 1950s) and all the shops selling fancy goods ran a kind of club where you could pay off things you wanted in installments.

Still this taught us deferment of gratification, how to budget and save money. It also taught us that things in life are not handed over on a plate and you have to expect to earn them. It was good preparation for the world of work.

Much later, when I worked as an academic, I did a survey on young people's pocket money and what (if anything) they had to do in the way of chores to earn it. Some parents were quite disapproving of the idea of asking their offspring to do chores in the home in return for pocket money.

If I were a multi millionaire I would still give my children an opportunity to EARN things rather than hand them life on a plate.

I agree @memberofthewedding I always had to 'earn' my pocket money.