by Kevin Leman
Some family members, due to age and abilities, will have more work to do than others. For instance, you wouldn’t expect a 6-yearold to do the same kind and quality of work that you would expect from a 14-year-old. But by the same token, the older child also has some perks that the younger child doesn’t have—for example, a later bedtime and the freedom to go out with friends.
I suggest that you start a child with an allowance around the age of 5. Give the child, say, 5 quarters ($1.25 per week). There’s nothing more wonderful to a child than to have something of her own, and shiny quarters are like gold to a young child. Age 5 is also a good age at which to begin teaching the value of money—what a penny, nickel, dime, quarter, and dollar are worth and what they can buy. Go to the bank together and start a savings account for the child. Invest in a money market account or a stock, if you are able to do so. (It’s amazing how small amounts can grow, and it’s wonderful for a child to see this on a quarterly or yearly basis).
If a child wants to spend money on something above the cost of what he has in his allowance, do not pad his allowance money.
Have the child wait to purchase that item until he has enough money to buy the item himself. Then he can experience that thrill of buying what he himself has earned—and also the dash of buyer’s remorse if he accidentally breaks a plastic toy he purchased. Having “money of my own” gives a child some dominion over dollars and a growing understanding of how long it takes you to pile up the cash needed to buy certain things for your family.
As a child gets older, increase that child’s allowance with respect to her age. The more money you give your older child in her allowance, the more the child can do with it, whether saving or spending.
Our Lauren, who is now 15, loves to save her allowance. Someday she’ll be happy to have a little nest egg all her own for a special purchase. Little Kayla, who is 8, is also a saver. She puts every penny she receives into her buy-a-horse-someday fund. But last year, when she heard about a little girl who lost her home in a flood, she dipped into her allowance and sent that girl’s family a special gift—from her very own heart and finances.
Kyle, who is 11, discovered quickly that money doesn’t grow on trees and that what’s hot among his peer group today may not be hot tomorrow. It took half a year’s allowance to buy a skateboard. Three weeks after his purchase, his classmates laughed at his skateboard because it wasn’t the latest and greatest anymore. Now Kyle tends to buy only things that he really wants—not items that he thinks will make him popular.
Children need to know that when the money is spent, it’s spent. There’s no free lunch in life.
If your child asks for more money because he’s used up what he has, say, “Well, payday isn’t until Saturday. I’m sure you’ll make something work.” Would it kill your son to pack a lunch for school instead of going out with his buddies to the local pizza joint?
Would you say to your boss, “Hey, I need more money to last me until Saturday”? Then don’t allow your kids to manipulate you either.
But should you ever pay your children for specific jobs? Let’s say that your daughter comes to you and says, “I’d like to earn some extra money this summer. Anything I can do around here?”
“Well,” you say, “I’ve wanted to get the garage painted for 2 years. If you paint the garage, I’ll give you $100.”
Such a deal, which is beyond the norm of your child’s usual responsibilities, is a great way for you not only to get a job done but also to allow your child the opportunity to earn additional money for a special project. And when the painting is complete, you can bet your daughter will look at that garage every day and be satisfied with her accomplishment.
Children need to know that upholding their end of the bargain as a family member is important. If they don’t, there are consequences.
For instance, let’s say your 14-year-old doesn’t mow the lawn like he’s supposed to. Instead of nagging or bickering with him about when he’ll do it, what if you just quietly hired another sibling or someone from the neighborhood to cut the lawn? What if the money it cost to hire that person was taken out of your son’s allowance the following week? Do you think you’d get the message across quickly?
Let’s say that your older child always does everything you expect her to do. You can count on her jobs being done; you don’t even have to check.
Then there’s her younger sibling who hates to do a lick of work but is supposed to clean out his room. When he doesn’t, what do you usually do? Rag on him, right?
What if, instead of saying anything at all, you asked his sister to go in and clean his room, and you paid her $4 out of your son’s next allowance for doing so? Chances are, little brother isn’t going to be happy that (1) he lost some of his allowance, and (2) his sister was in his room.
But do you think you got your point across that all family members are expected to pitch in, and when they don’t, they have to pay someone else to do what was expected of them?
Allowances teach children how to manage money—and they also teach children firsthand about consequences. For example, I could run my car through the car wash and hand the workers $8. Or I could wash the car myself in the driveway and keep the $8 in my pocket. It’s all a matter of choice.
If your child doesn’t get around to a certain task, don’t cajole her, remind her, or lecture her. Simply hire someone else to do that task and take whatever you had to pay that person from your child’s allowance. There are no threats, no warnings—only action.
That action will speak much louder than any words you could use. I know, because it got swift results in my own home. Our teenage children were responsible to cook dinner for us one night a week in order to give my wife, Sande, a break. One night I arrived home from work, and there was no dinner cooking. So I decided it was a good time for a teachable moment. I took Sande out for dinner at one of her favorite places, where they serve food with real silver forks, not plastic picnic ware. When our children received their allowances the following week, the price of that dinner had been divvied up among them and taken out of their allowances. Do you think that ever happened again in our house?
Lesson learned.
Anger
“Mike would come home from school, go into his room, slam the door, and start punching his pillow. I’d try to talk to him, but he’d always tell me to go away—that I was butting into his business.”
“Shawnee pitched a fit—an honest-to-goodness screaming fit—every day when it was time to take a nap. I got so tired of it. I was the one who had to take the nap while she roamed the house freely.”
“It doesn’t take much for Tim to blow, and when he blows, it affects our whole house. Everybody gets really, really quiet and goes and hides in their rooms. It’s like, to him, he’s the only one that counts.”
“Monica doesn’t yell; she seethes. I’d rather she yell than give me the silent treatment.”
What’s the atmosphere like in your house? Is an angry person in control? Interestingly enough, a person can be loudly angry or quietly angry. Either way, you get the picture loud and clear.
When it comes right down to it, anger is an active choice to control someone else. It’s projecting your thoughts and emotions onto another person in an attempt to change their behavior.
The children above have learned that being angry wins them something. They get attention, they get their way, people feel sorry for them, etc. They are angry because that purposive behavior puts them in the driver’s seat in their home. Without it, they don’t have the control they crave. So they create, in effect, a temper tantrum that says, “Pay attention to me!”
Guess how they learned this behavior? Probably from a parent (usually a mom) who is a people pleaser and likes the oceans of life smooth. In order to keep them that way, she’ll do anything to avoid harsh words. The child is smart enough to know that regardless of age, throwing a temper tantrum will gain him exactly what he wants—everything from sympathy about a hard day to mone
y for a movie to the car keys for the evening. Your child is a skillful manipulator.
How’d he get this way? Such maladies don’t just appear. They fester over time. They start with an 18-month-old who feels misplaced when little sister comes home from the hospital, so he throws a fit to make sure his place is still secure. What do we as parents do? We try to squash the behavior quickly when, in fact, all that child is saying is, “Hey, I feel a little left out here. Will someone pay attention to me?”
What would most parents say in such a situation? “Stop it, Buford! You need to learn to get along with your new little sister. Things aren’t going to be the same around here anymore, and you might as well get used to it.” This sort of statement just ups the ante on the fear and displacement the child is feeling. But what if the parent said, “Come over here, Buford. Are you feeling left out? I know things have changed with having a little sister. But I want you to know that you are just as important to me as you always were. You don’t need to throw a tantrum to get my attention. Just come to me and ask me for a hug, and I’d be happy to give you one.”
Anger isn’t always bad, either. Did you know that you can be good and angry? Bad things happen in life, and it’s okay to be angry about things that are unjust. Like the teacher who doesn’t believe your daughter didn’t cheat on her exam and gives her an F. Or the coach who thinks your son was the prankster who removed the tires from his car and refuses to let him play for the big game. If your children were innocent and wrongly framed, they have every right to be angry.
So being angry in itself isn’t right or wrong; it’s how the anger is handled that is right or wrong. What should you do when your child explodes in anger?
Imagine that you have a balloon in front of you. Each time you get angry, you blow those bad feelings into the balloon. If no pressure is released after a while, the balloon will pop. But if you let a bit of air out, little by little, the balloon stays malleable, with no threat of it breaking.
That’s the goal with children: to teach them how to handle anger. If children talk about what bothers them, it’s like releasing the air out of the balloon. So give your children opportunities to talk about what is bothering them. Begin with open-ended statements: “You seem upset.” “I can tell by your face that something’s bothering you.” “I’m ready to listen if you want to talk.”
When the child finally does talk, it may be a terrible sound, like the squawk air makes when it comes out of the balloon. But remember your end goal: to keep your child malleable and less brittle.
Teach your child to use “I” statements rather than “you” statements. For example: “I feel like you don’t respect me when you do this” instead of “You diss me all the time.” Or “I feel angry when my sister goes into my room and plays with my things when she knows I don’t want her to” instead of “She’s such a jerk. She knows I don’t want her to play with my things and she does anyway.” Talking in “I” terms focuses on how your child feels about what’s happening rather than pointing an accusing finger at someone else. This method models how to talk things out rather than strike out. It also works extremely well in solving sibling rivalry. (See also “Sibling Rivalry.”)
Attending Your Place of Worship
“Jeri always went to church with us with no complaints. But the Sunday after she turned 15, she said she was sick. The Sunday after that she claimed she was sick again. By the third Sunday she simply told me that she wasn’t going to my stuffy old church anymore. That the only kids who went there were geeks and weirdos, and she didn’t want to be pegged like them. Jeri’s always been such a good kid. What went wrong?”
“When I remarried, I became a dad to Christopher, who was 13.He made it clear right off the bat that (1) he didn’t need a father, and (2) there was no way he was going to spend a day at some old church when he could be at the beach nearby with his buddies. I know he’s been through a lot of changes in the last couple years and his friends are really important, but it’s important to me for us to go as a family to church. Should I push the issue and make him go? Or will that make him hate not only me but God? Should I just give him some time and hope it works out?”
There’s a wonderful saying: “The family who goes to church together stays together.” However, what that saying didn’t add was, “. . . unless the teenagers in the family are kicking and screaming about going—in which case the family staying together is loud and not all that fun.”
Far too many parents tread on their teenagers’ feelings on this issue and ramp up this situation until it becomes a war. But before you get hot about what you think I’m going to say, hear me out.
First of all, don’t deny your child’s feelings. Let’s be honest. There are a lot of geeks and weirdos in churches (after all, churches are made up of human beings, and we all have our quirks—some of us more than others). So if your child points out that the majority of kids in the youth group are weird, then tell the truth: “You’re right. They are weird.” By telling the truth and agreeing with your child, you’ll: (1) surprise your child and get her to pay attention to your next words, and (2) get on the same playing field as your child, where you’re seeing eye to eye.
What you say next is crucial: “Your mother and I only ask you to do a few basic things, and one of the things we expect you to do is go to our place of worship.” Before the child opens her mouth again, say, “We know you don’t want to be there, but we want you to know how thankful we are that you are willing to come with us out of respect for us. There are many things we as parents do for you that we don’t really like to do. But we do them anyway out of respect for you. So please get ready for church.”
Depending on the personality of your child, that may sway her into coming with you. But no matter what you say, some kids will throw these words in your face: “I’m will throw these not going.”
If that happens, don’t make a federal case out of it. Simply get ready for church and leave.
“What?” you’re saying. “But, Dr. Leman—”
Let me finish. After church, do one thing different: don’t come home. Make a day of it somewhere. Go out for dinner after church, go to a park or enjoy some shopping after that, see a movie. . . . In other words, take your jolly good time coming home. When you walk in after 5:00 that afternoon and your teenage son says, “Where the heck have you been?” simply say, “Church.”
“But church is over at noon,” he argues. “It’s 5:15. When are we going to get some food around here? I’m starving!”
Simply rub your full stomach and say, “Food? Don’t even mention that. The strawberry pie topped it off. . . .”
If your child continues to refuse to go to church the next week, do the same thing again. Make a day of it without the child. Then, after making your point, talk to him straight: “Frank, I realize you’re an individual, and we’re not all the same. You don’t have to believe what I believe. I can’t make you go to church. But I want to make it clear to you that I expect you to be with us next Sunday. Is that understood?”
All of a sudden the person in authority has changed, and your son is no longer in the driver’s seat. In many cases, this is all the tough love that’s needed. The next Sunday he’ll be out in the car, ready to go.
Sometimes, though, a teen will still absolutely refuse to go, even after you’ve tried the previous steps of tough love. So you as a parent have a choice. You could:
1. Let him stay home in bed like a slug, shrug, forget about it, and not raise your blood pressure.
2. Let him stay home but assign him extra work to be done around the house since he now has idle time.
Of the two options, I’d definitely choose having him do some extra work while you’re gone. Every family member needs to contribute.And part of that contribution is doing certain things together.If your teen decides he doesn’t want to contribute in that way, ramp up what he needs to contribute in another area, even if it’s something he’s not crazy about. It’s like the day the john backed up at
my house. We all pitched in to clean up the mess because that was what life required of us. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t fun, but we did it as a family.
Don’t let your child get off scot-free just because he doesn’t “feel like” being a part of your family. Either he goes with you to your place of worship, or he pulls extra duty in another area of responsibility. (And here’s a secret: because at the heart of every child is a longing to belong and be accepted, it won’t be long, after using this technique, that your child will begin to feel lonely and want to be a part of the family again—including attending your place of worship.)
Attention Seeking
“Last week we had my new boss and his wife over for dinner. We put our 8-year-old, Charlie, in bed, and I went to the kitchen to prepare dessert. Five minutes later I heard a heart-stopping crash from the living room. Charlie had sailed down our stair railing—something he knows he’s never supposed to do—and landed smack in the middle of a table that has our Tiffany lamp on it. The lamp shattered in a bunch of pieces, and Charlie cut his hand. Instead of serving dessert, we ended up taking Charlie to the ER to get his hand stitched up. What would possess him to do that, when he’d never done anything like that before? I was shocked.”
“Our 3-year-old twins, Kylie and Kari, always act extra silly and talk nonstop when my girlfriends come over to the house. I can never get a word in edgewise with my adult friends. It’s like the Kylie and Kari entertainment hour.”
