Allowance should be based on the cost of living where you are. Here, a typical movie costs 9-10 bucks not including popcorn. I would say a movie or two a month and then some pocket change would be a good bet. If she likes reading (don’t know many 5th graders who do) add in the cost of a typical paperback (they are around 8 bucks here). 25-40 bucks a month sounds like a reasonable range for an allowance here. That would be a book and a movie plus a very little amount of pocket change.
Hey, that sounds like a similar setup in Earthbound on SNES where the main character got money deposited into his ATM account by his dad.
I’d say $50 per month, but with that she has to buy her own toys & some of her clothes. girls that age (11?) are into clothes.
My 11 year old gets $5 per week, and is quite content and able to save up for large purchases. As others have mentioned, I don’t tie it to household chores, because pitching in is expected in a family (an exception is one-time large chores, such as helping with the annual leaf deluge in the fall, when we mulch several hundred pounds–that merits a bonus). However, I’m really intrigued with the monthly-deposit-and-ATM-card scheme, and may well give it a whirl. Thanks for the idea!
My 5th grade son gets $5/week deposited automatically into his Quicken account on my computer. Whenever he spends any, we enter it into that account and categorize expenditure. Then he can see how much he spends on candy or video games or whatever.
I do not believe in tying allowance to chores. My kids have to do their chores no matter what. It is part of being in the family.
I got $5 a week when I was that age, but it didn’t last long–my parents kept on forgetting, and I was too polite to remind them.
My parents have also normally been of the “chores are something you do to help the family” school of thought. That is, until one day. . .
. . .see, sometime during high school–I think it was between my sophomore and junior years–I realized that I was doing almost all the major chores. I was vacuuming and dusting the downstairs (which is finished, and has no private rooms, hence I do the entire floor) as well as my room, cutting the grass, cleaning the toilets, shoveling the snow, splitting the raking with my mom, and doing whatever odd chores my dad thought up, such as, say, scrubbing down the entire kitchen. Pretty much, the only things I didn’t do was washing the floors, and that was pretty much because my mom realized I sucked at it.
I started demanding pay, on the premise that, well, it’s my duty to pitch in, but I’m pitching in my part, my dad’s part, and a good chunk of my little sister’s part, so I should be compensated.
It worked, and I got $20 per week, contingent upon what I did or didn’t do (if I didn’t do much that week, I wouldn’t get paid).
For a 5th grader, 5 dollars a week should be pretty good.