{"id":200,"date":"2009-06-22T09:52:29","date_gmt":"2009-06-22T16:52:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/?p=200"},"modified":"2025-11-09T10:26:50","modified_gmt":"2025-11-09T17:26:50","slug":"kids-and-moneythe-when","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/?p=200","title":{"rendered":"Kids and Money…the When"},"content":{"rendered":"

When my oldest was about 6 was when I started to realize I wanted to really crack down on the whole chores issue.\u00a0 <\/span>At that time my 3 boys were 2, 4 & 6.\u00a0 <\/span>I was getting lost of interesting kid toys catalogs and I found a little chart of what kids can do at what age and a chart to keep track of chores.\u00a0\u00a0 So I bought one and went online to discover what they could do and at what age they could do it.
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In that first year I put easy chores on the chart that they could do.\u00a0 <\/span>Empty the silverware, make their bed, feed the fish (we didn\u2019t have the dog then), etc.\u00a0 <\/span>They loved the chore chart (which now has double the spaces for chores on it as the picture because I added more with a Sharpie about 4 years later).\u00a0 <\/span>The chart came with 3 different color stars to put on the spaces when each child completed that chore.\u00a0 <\/span>It was mostly filled with Luke\u2019s stars because as the oldest he loved it.\u00a0 <\/span>I put stars on each chore they did at the end of the day and we counted them all up at the end of the week and I gave them a penny a star.\u00a0 <\/span>Participants immediately got piggy banks to put their pennies in.\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Now to be clear, I had to supervise almost all of the jobs until the child doing them got comfortable with it.\u00a0 <\/span>Just a pinch of fish food, please, no\u2026too much, no\u2026too little, yes\u2026that\u2019s perfect.\u00a0 <\/span>Day after day until they got it.\u00a0 <\/span>Did this add to my work load?\u00a0 <\/span>Yes.\u00a0 <\/span>Did all my chores take just that much longer?\u00a0 <\/span>Oh yes.\u00a0 <\/span>Was it worth it?\u00a0 <\/span>OH YES! (see next blog)<\/span><\/p>\n

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The beauty of this system is the chores are dry erase.\u00a0 <\/span>I can change, reword, add to and remove chores as the children get older.\u00a0 <\/span>I can add chores like \u201cPractice something\u201d and \u201cMake an observation in your Journal\u201d or my favorite \u201cBe Mom\u2019s assistant\u201d.\u00a0 <\/span>I will note that after two years I retired the \u201cstars\u201d because they stabbed under my fingernails every week when I took them off the chart (Ouch!) and switched to dry erase pens, where I entered little E\u2019s, C\u2019s and L\u2019s every day.\u00a0 <\/span>Now they are old enough to enter their own chore accomplishments and when they don\u2019t, guess what, they don\u2019t get paid!<\/span><\/p>\n

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So the \u201cwhen\u201d answer is really, \u201cAnytime\u201d.\u00a0 <\/span>The real key is that kids change as they age and chores and motivations must change with them.\u00a0 <\/span>But the ultimate parenting goal remained the same:\u00a0 <\/span>teach them the value of money AND how to do all the household chores at the same time.<\/span><\/p>\n

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My personal goal\u2026NOT to be doing any housework, cooking, etc. by the time they are 14, 16 & 18.\u00a0 <\/span>Hey don\u2019t mock me\u2026a girl can dream!\u00a0 And boy can my youngest scrub a toilet.<\/span><\/p>\n

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When my oldest was about 6 was when I started to realize I wanted to really crack down on the whole chores issue.\u00a0 At that time my 3 boys were 2, 4 & 6.\u00a0 I was getting lost of interesting … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-narcissist-secrets"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=200"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5067,"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions\/5067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}