Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Join me, Jess VanderWier, a registered psychotherapist, mom of three, and founder of Nurtured First, along with my husband Scott, as we dive deep into the stories of our friends, favourite celebrities, and influential figures.
In each episode, we skip the small talk and dive into vulnerable and honest conversations about topics like cycle breaking, trauma, race, mental health, parenting, sex, religion, postpartum, healing, and loss.
We are glad you are here.
PS: The name Robot Unicorn comes from our daughter. When we asked her what we should name the podcast, she confidently came up with this name because she loves robots, and she loves unicorns, so why not? There was something about the playfulness of the name, the confidence in her voice, and the fact that it represents that you can love two things at once that just felt right.
Hey friends, welcome back to Robot Unicorn.
I have Scott here staring at me.
We recorded a two-part series on allowances.
And if you haven't already listened to last week's episode, make sure to check that out before listening to this episode because they kind of go together
In this episode, we're going to talk about a little more practical ways that you could potentially use allowances in your home if you wanted to.
And we're also going to talk about why you might not need to use an allowance or might not
Have an allowance for your children.
So it's it was a really fun conversation, which is why it ended up being two episodes long.
And we hope you enjoy it
Welcome to Robot Unicorn, hosted by my parents.
Jess and Scott.
I hope you enjoyed the episode.
So one of our main questions for this was, should kids get an allowance at all?
And I personally believe, again, because there's not great research out there, but I personally believe that it would be better to give your child
nothing, so no allowance, then to give them money without some form of teaching to go along with it.
If you're not going to explain how to use the money wisely, then you shouldn't be giving them anything, because it is not going to set them up.
for success by just giving them money.
Yeah.
I just think that that's not that can't work.
But if you do, let's say I actually feel like I've been convinced.
that we should be giving our kids something every week.
Or a month.
Well, so there is other research about like keeping things in memory for kids that are younger.
And if you do it more regularly, so even if it's you say, okay, this is how much we want to give per month, but we're going to give it
every single week instead, but divided by four point three or whatever it is in a month.
Yeah.
That will keep it in their memory and they'll think about it a little bit more.
And they'll it'll constantly kind of be in their mind if every Saturday morning
They're getting a small amount of money and we get okay, let's bring it to your your piggy bank or if we decide to do the three-jar system, which is the spend, save, give.
system we kind of divide it up and figure out how we're going to do that but it allows us to kind of teach them more regularly too
And if we do it for all of them, then we can kind of be like, Okay, let's sit down all together.
Okay, we're giving you your weekly allowance.
Here's your weekly lesson.
Not that we're gonna do that, but it's kind of like Yeah.
We can have that conversation as we're putting it in their piggy bank or their wallet.
And then eventually
as our kids get older we can add a bank account where they start putting money into a bank account.
Maybe it's just once a month at that point then.
Yeah.
So what would you do?
Let's just say I I would know this situation would be tricky for me.
So I'm just curious how you would handle this.
So let's say we do that, we give them a tunie, you know, every week.
Do Americans know, or anyone else know what toonies are?
Toonies are Canadian two dollar coin.
So let's say we give them a toonie every week
They save it up.
I can just see this for our oldest.
Okay, she's saved it up.
Now she has twelve dollars.
As soon as she has twelve dollars, I know that's enough for her to go to the store and buy one of those little stuffies.
That's the first thing she's gonna want to do.
She knows how much they are.
What do you say when she wants to go do that with her twelve dollars every time she saves up for twelve dollars?
Yeah, I mean you're kind of skipping over, I think, the middle part where we're kind of explaining the values, right?
Where we explain as you get older, we work, we make money.
It goes into a bank account and then it has to get divided up amongst, say, cell phone bills and our internet and our
electricity and gas and mortgage and it gets divided up into all these things.
So you can't just spend all of that every single time you bring it in.
You can't just divide it up and say, okay, I want this thing that I really love.
Because that's just not realistic.
And I mean that's a very shortened version of it.
But then there's also and like we have the value of giving away a certain portion of the money that because we feel that we
let's say don't necessarily deserve all of the money that we receive and we're very lucky to have the resources that we have, then we also want to make sure that we are giving away some of it.
So you have to
kind of explain all these different things, our value system that we have with our money and resources.
I feel like it and try and instill it in them.
And again, you're not giving them two dollars or five dollars every week and saying, you can spend it on whatever you want.
We can't
micromanage to the point of you can only buy the things that I say.
Yeah.
But I th I do do feel like it's kind of a you have to guide them along the path.
You're hand holding them a little bit and as they get older, they'll be able to
make more decisions on their own.
So would you say then that you would try and teach them to, you know, sums for spending, sums for saving, some is for giving of the money that we give them through the allowance?
Yeah, I mean that's kind of the uh wouldn't say the experts
But the or not the scientific way, but that's what a lot of financial advisors and people would recommend is split it up into three jars.
spend, save, give, jars, and then teach them the value of all of them.
And then especially for spending and giving, I feel like because we're hand holding them a little bit
We can say okay this week, you know what, we're gonna go out and if you wanna buy something, maybe one of those things and I'll go half of
on it with you is we're gonna go buy some donuts and bring it to our neighbor's house and we're gonna give away some of the money that you've made.
And I just want you to notice how it feels when you do that.
Yeah, and there was research that I was reading too about toddlers under two showing like our littlest kids showing greater happiness actually when they gave than when they received.
Or when they purchased got something for themselves.
And I actually included in my book.
There is a bunch of actually about how giving
is very fulfilling and helps, helps us actually feel a lot better than actually just doing things only for ourselves
And so I do think that that's an important part of the discussion for our children as well.
And just helping them see that they can use their money for good and for positive things for other people as well.
But to bring it back to my question about second just picture
A lot of the clients that I work with, a lot of the kids that I know, you know, you could have these discussions with them, but then they see that stuffy and they know at home they have
eleven dollars or whatever it is.
And I could just see their brain getting stuck in that moment and then being like, you gave me that money.
You said it was mine.
I'm spending it on this.
How do you
And I can share how I would, but how would you handle that type of situation that probably comes up for parents who give their kids money?
I would probably
set in place one of our values is a 24 hour rule or something like that where you if there's something that you were not already considering buying and all of a sudden you're
Like, oh, I'm gonna get this, a spontaneous purchase of some kind.
I would probably just say our rule as a family is it's okay if you want to buy that, but you have to wait
A full 24 hours.
And you have to think on it and kind of again because they're little, their brain can get stuck on things.
It's our next episode.
Foreshadowing.
But their brain can get stuck on things.
And then
uh it takes them a while to get out of that.
Right.
So I would kind of I would set in place, again, we're not giving it to them saying this is all yours and you get to do a
Whatever you want with it, we're trying to teach them a few skills.
And then as they get older you let them make bigger and bigger decisions and
Again, you can let them make that mistake if you if I know our oldest daughter wants these two things and she spontaneously purchases this, this one thing she sees at the store.
And that means that she can't buy this other thing then for two months.
And now she's sad about that.
And now she's sad about that.
I actually think that's a good a good thing to teach her.
And I wouldn't bail her out in that either.
I wouldn't then all of a sudden buy her that.
Mm-hmm
Because I think that's kind of a good teaching method is to let them deal with the natural consequences of their decisions sometimes too.
Yeah, so those were the two things I was gonna say as well.
One, I already make the kids do this whenever I'm shopping with them and they like want something which is every single time I go shopping with them.
Yep.
But okay, I'll give you an example of this happen
It's the most ridiculous thing.
So we went to a bookstore last summer and that day, I don't know why, it was like some sort of special day, and I had said to the kids, like you each have a couple dollars and you can spend it.
I think we're going to the dollar store after something like that
Oh, I think it was like the first day of summer holidays.
Something like that.
And we were gonna get something that they could do, you know, craft or something.
Anyway, we go to this bookstore and our middle child sees this pin and the pin can like get pinned to your shirt and the pin says, I don't even know if I ever told you this
It says romance book lover on it.
And it's beautiful.
It's like this beautiful pin.
It has like all these hearts all over it.
pink and red and white and our daughter was just like she gets very intense about things and she was like I love this like she just thought it was the most beautiful pin she's ever seen
And she was like, I must have it.
And I of course.
Yeah, right.
And I would said to her, hun, there's a lot of things that you really, really love
and that you've seen today and that you really, really love.
I'm not gonna buy this for you right now, but if you still remember it and you still love it in a month, I gave her a whole month because I was pretty sure she was gonna forget about it, then we can go back and get it.
It wasn't that expensive.
I could easily have just bought it in the moment.
Yeah.
But I know she loves so many things and we had already had the plan to go to the dollar store, right?
So she agreed and for the next month she talked to me about that pin
She drew pictures of it.
She talked to me about it.
She reminded me of it.
She asked me if it had been a month yet.
She
thought about, dreamed about it, and finally a month later, she had still been asking me about the pen.
I still really want it.
I still like that's the special thing that I want.
So we went back and they actually gave it to her.
I didn't realize that it was gonna be like we came back, they remembered her and it was like just the local bookstore in town, yeah.
And they were like, you know what, just she can have it.
Yeah, I honestly think it was like a like one dollar or two dollars or something.
But it was more the principle of like I'm not just gonna buy everything that you want and maybe it was too long of a time, but I honestly thought she was gonna forget about it, but she didn't.
And now I've seen her wearing that pin a whole bunch of times.
She even wore it to school the other day and I was like, oh my word, book romance book lover, like literally shaking my head.
But for her it's just a beautiful pin and she
loves the hearts and she doesn't she can't read it or anything.
But anyway, that was an example I thought of like I think it was probably too long.
I didn't need to like maybe do a whole month.
But where I wanted to show her and her sister to pause, actually think about is this the one thing that you really, really want?
And if you still really want it, and you've thought about it, okay, we can go back
But it's not just about the second you think you desperately want something, I'm just gonna buy it for you.
Yeah, maybe the 24-hour rule is a bit that would be more for
Maybe an older kid.
Yeah, like I think our oldest.
Even our oldest, it might be too short.
Yeah.
They like stuff.
That makes sense.
Kids like stuff.
But I really like the delay.
Especially as a little pack rat, though.
She's
She loves her stuff.
Yeah.
Anyone gives her a little trinket or even a special rock and she will have it squirreled away somewhere in her room.
And you ask her, what is all this?
And she ha she remembers every single item who it came from and what it was and why it's special to her.
So yeah.
All that to say, I think the pause, like you know your kids, I think that m could have been a bit too long, but this idea that just because they desperately want it in the moment and also my other role for myself
is I never buy them something because they're crying about it and they're dysregulated about it.
Then it's nope, you know, we can come back, we can talk about this as a family if that's something we want to buy.
But, you know, we don't buy kids things just because
they've now got themselves worked up and they really want it.
Well it seems like I can't remember which statistic this was from, but it was said a roughly 65% of parents can't let their kids make
these money mistakes.
Yes, I think.
So they'll bail them out.
Yeah.
If they don't have enough or they spent it on something else but wanted this other thing and are sad, they'll bail them out.
And I feel like that's
personally not a great idea.
Just because again, you're kind of saying, oh, it doesn't really matter.
Like you'll get what you want kind of regardless of the decisions that you make.
So it's not a it's no longer a helpful tool anymore.
But I think there's probably a fine line between that and also being like, after you told them you're gonna want this other thing more, kind of like an I Told You So moment where
Hey, I told you you're not gonna want this and you're gonna be upset.
And now you did it.
See, look what happened.
Right.
I feel like there's probably a balance between them or
It's more about the like I think with everything parenting, it's about accepting the discomfort, right?
Helping them sit with that, like, hey, you made a mistake, you know, in the moment you
Really, really thought you wanted that stuffy, so you bought it and now you're disappointed because your eleven dollars whatever is gone.
That's tough.
Right.
So then it goes back to I think all of the foundational things that we teach.
It's like
Like allowing the disappointment, allowing the discomfort, talking them through it, but not jumping in to fix it and save the day and be like, it's okay though, here's another ten dollars, you can get the other thing that you wanted.
I think those are just important life skills
the disappointment and the frustration tolerance that I want for our children.
Yeah, as we're talking though, I'm like, oof, definitely gonna get some pushback on this one.
Oh, anytime I talk about, you know, kind of these strict boundaries like this, and I do receive a fair amount of
pushback.
Um I think it's uncomfortable because for a lot of parents it's hard for them to see how this can be done in a way that's loving and kind
Because I think they may have grown up with similar rules, but it wasn't done in a kind way, right?
So I think it's important to name like
You're doing this, but you're doing this all out of that secure relationship that you have built with your child where they trust what you're saying and they want to listen to you and always comes back down.
to the relationship that you have.
If you don't have that strong relationship, then these conversations might not go as far.
Yeah.
Hey friends, so at pickup last week, our daughter asked Scott a truly kind of tricky question in front of her younger siblings.
Scott was telling me that when he heard a question like this, he used to panic, but this time he had a plan.
And he said to our daughter, Thank you for asking.
Let's talk tonight when we've got privacy.
And that's a line that he learned straight from our new body safety and consent course at Nurture First.
So this new body safety and consent course is taught by me.
So Jess, if you listen to this podcast, you know me.
I'm a child therapist and a mom of three, and I have taught body safety and consent education for years.
This course takes all my years of experience teaching this education and gives you calm, age-appropriate language for body parts, consent, and boundaries.
You'll learn how to teach your kids that no means no, you'll learn how to teach them to read facial cues, you'll talk about safe and unspeakable.
safe touch and you'll even teach them about their uh oh feeling.
There's guidance inside this course for the real life stuff like tickling that goes too far and even the difference between a secret and a surprise.
We made this course at Nurture First because research shows that body safety education helps kids speak
sooner and we want that for our family, for Scott and I, but also for you.
So check the course out at nurturefirst.
com slash body safety and to save 10% use the code
Robot Unicorn.
And just full disclosure here, we are the creators of this course and we're so proud of it.
We sort of touched on what can make this hard for real families.
Right.
So if we want to talk about class and culture and all that, if you don't have the funds to do this, it might sound like we're saying allowances.
If you use them as a tool are gonna help your kids do better with money in the long run.
Uh so we should probably talk about what parents can do
if they don't have the means to actually give an allowance to the kids.
Yeah, and I think we've already said too, like allowances aren't the be-all and all of financial literacy.
And the reason why I would say the
Studies were not great is because I think they skewed heavily towards like the research bias towards
affluent individuals, largely affluent white individuals in North America in the US.
That's why I kind of take a bunch of what they say with a grain of salt because
It's not really um comprehensive research.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's not an accurate representation of the whole world.
Right.
So each culture might do it.
differently too.
Like what I found was apparently in Germany it's a very common thing to just give children a weekly allowance.
It's not tied to necessarily chores or anything.
It's just a weekly allowance and they let kids go off often to buy their own things
in the store and everything at a pretty young age where we might not do that as quickly.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I think it's an important part of the conversation.
Like the whole allowance discussion is a bit of a privilege discussion, just
to even assume that parents have the extra funds to give their child an office.
Sure.
I mean it could be fifty cents or dollar.
Like it doesn't really matter.
It's more than a lot of things.
I was going to say that too.
It's not necessarily about
the amount that you're giving your child.
And I also think, let's say allowance aside, like you don't give your child any weekly, monthly amount of money, you can still have these conversations with them.
Like still do
what I was just talking about, right?
Which is like the pause.
You're not necessarily buying them the first thing that they want when you're at the store.
You're trying to help them understand.
Well I mean realistically, if you're not able to afford to get them
give them an allowance, then you're probably also not able to buy them a toy at the store.
Yeah, that's true.
Right.
So I think that maybe isn't the best example and it might be more it's probably going back to the underlying
most beneficial part of this allowance discussion is actually that relationship and having those conversations with your child, practicing with them, maybe including them in some of your financial decision making.
Not allowing them to make the decisions, obviously, but
including them in the decision making that we as a couple make even and I think our modeling as well.
So the way we spend money, I think, can make a big impact.
Yeah, I think
Letting your kids even see your decision process, let's say at the grocery store.
Like I'll sometimes talk the kids through like this is why I'm choosing this carton of milk.
right because there is a whole bunch of options and they're all different prices and here's the why I'm choosing this one.
So like having those discussions just in your day-to-day life
One thing I would caution parents is involving your child in your financial struggles.
Yeah, right.
I I think that's something I hear a lot from people who did grow up in
families who didn't have a lot of money where the child then felt responsible for the parent's financial stress or struggles.
And so we do want to be mindful of that.
Like I think it's okay to include children in the discussion and talk about why you're choosing which items and having these conversations while also not making them feel responsible for your family financial stress
Good point.
Okay, so now if we were to give our children an allowance, maybe that's a good place to start, how much
Do you think is a reasonable amount to give?
How do you determine what's a reasonable amount?
Because a lot of people will say there's the one year, $1 per year rule where you give
a dollar for every year old the your child is or you just give them a flat like five dollars a week or ten dollars a month or something like that
And when they get older, maybe you're able to give them more and they have more to purchase their own clothes eventually and all that kind of stuff.
How can we determine what the right amount is?
Yeah, I mean A, I don't think that there's one clear path here
But I would say for me what I would feel comfortable with is starting with a low amount and building up over the years, especially because we want to increase that financial literacy.
We want to teach them the value
And for a child, like they don't really necessarily understand the difference between $5, $10, $20 when they're so young.
So I would want to start with just a small amount that they could visually see.
We can talk about even
If it's coins like what is this coin or what is this like what is this bill about?
And then slowly increasing that over time as we see responsibility with it and we see uh the way
It's going for our family.
Is this something that's even working?
That doesn't give me a clear answer what we should do for our family, but we'll talk about that after maybe too.
Yeah, I mean I don't have a number I'm pulling out right now, but I'm just saying I would want to start quite small.
I think that makes sense.
We'll move on then
We'll do the final question.
If uh parents can take one thing away from this episode, what do you think they should take away?
That Scott can change his mind.
I've changed my mind many times.
No, that's actually true.
You have changed your mind a lot on many different things.
That is one thing I really appreciate about you.
And this time it wasn't even based on research that I felt to be uh reliable.
Well, to be honest, sometimes I love those discussions the most where we don't necessarily have like this reliable research, but we just want to have an intentional discussion about something that as parents you just don't always have the time
Like allowances are truly just something we've never really thought about or talked about.
And I think that because of that, that's probably the case for so many parents
And that's probably why some parents are just like, okay, I'll attach it to chores, or I'll just give them $5 a week or I'll just do this or I'll do whatever I had because we don't always have time to sit down and have intentional discussions.
And so I'd say for parents, you get to choose
Right?
Like it's not like there's a very clear black and white research on this.
So you get to look at the gray area and then decide what works for your family.
But so the takeaway I'd want is reflection.
I guess, and thinking about what's gonna work best for your family and maybe letting Scott and I's conversation be a conversation starter for you and your partner or whoever would be giving an allowance with you.
What about you?
I think the one thing that I want you, who's listening, to take away from this episode is that it's not really the allowance that teaches your child to be better with the resources that they're given over throughout their life
It is, and this is where I changed my mind, it can be a very useful tool.
Money can be a tool to do things that you want or get things that you want or help other people and
I think the conversations you have with your children around money and resources are more important than actually giving them an allowance.
It just also made me think of one other thing.
This might be interesting to get like an expert on at some point, like a financial literacy.
Like even for a lot of parents, I think.
having those discussions is hard because they never had anyone probably should have started with that right.
Yeah, exactly.
Like I'm just thinking about that right now.
At least our school system teaches very little unless you took in high school
the one accounting course that we had.
I didn't take that.
Neither did I.
So you have to either be very interested in it or you have to be taught by a family member or something like that.
Or you just be like, okay.
financial advisor, tell us what we have to do, because I have no clue.
Right.
And trust that they know.
Yeah.
And trust that they have your best interest.
Yeah.
So then yeah, I just was thinking about that at the end.
And like we're asking parents to like do this coaching, but for a lot of parents it's
that even might be hard because they're like, I'm gonna do the best I can, but I don't necessarily even have the skills to coach.
So that could be a future um topic or expert or something, just like even helping.
Well maybe there's another podcast out there that we could recommend at some point.
I feel like financial literacy is not something we could cover in one episode.
No.
We'll have to do our research on that.
Okay.
Well, hopefully you enjoyed this.
Did you enjoy this topic?
I actually did.
I thought this was great.
I was very interested in this topic as well, and I know that we have some
opinions that maybe don't feel like they're talked about a a lot.
Like I think sometimes people come at you and I saying that we're like just kind of tough in certain areas.
And I think
I mean we might be tougher than some parents.
Our own upbringings kind of and experiences and I think values impact that.
So I'm just curious how people will respond to it.
But I personally loved this topic and
It's fun to be uh recording recording again with you.
I would be very interested to hear if there's debate or controversy around this because I think
the way we do things is logical because we've and it's because we've been doing it for so long, I think now.
Maybe at the beginning I wouldn't have.
Yeah.
I probably wouldn't have, so yeah.
All right friends.
Okay.
Cool.
Good talk.
And we will talk to you again very, very soon.
Hey friends, thank you so much for listening to today's episode
We are glad that you are here.
If you enjoyed today's episode and found it interesting, we'd really appreciate it if you'd leave a rating and a review.
Scott and I actually sit down together and read them all.
A five-star rating helps us share our podcast and get these important messages out there.
Thank you so much for listening and we can't wait to talk to you again next time.