Parenting Cents

Well, that’s it.  The kids are fired.

As of today, G has emptied the dishwasher once and cleaned out Speedy’s litter box twice.  Needless to say, Speedy is not happy and neither am I.  G has also been neglecting her guitar, the lessons for which we are paying.  Her new Nintendo DS seems to be taking up every spare moment, at the expense of her actual responsibilities.  That’s something I thought would happen, and I couldn’t resist giving her an “I told you so” talk about it.

M has checked off “Garbage” every day this week.  The problem is that she hasn’t done the job every day.  A technicality, I know, but I can’t let it go.  She has been telling her mother that she doesn’t care whether she gets to earn money or not.  So now we’re letting her not.

We have informed both girls that they will not be paid for what they did – which isn’t much – this week.  They are also unemployed for at least two weeks.  If they come back to us with acceptable proposals, we’ll begin negotiations again.  They each need to bring us a list of jobs they are willing to do and the amount they would charge for each.  G (age 9) has said that she would like to keep the same jobs and just put more effort into getting them done.  M (age 5) has already created a list of jobs, including “Clean the entire house”, “Dust everything”, “Brush Speedy’s hair”, and “Clean mirrors”.  We’ll have to help her refine the list a bit to make it manageable for someone her age.  We also need to discuss her rate of pay, as she initially proposed being paid $10 to brush the cat.  I think I’d rather give the cat a cardboard box and let him take care of the brushing himself.

Including this week, they’ll each have at least three weeks of lost revenue.  I’m not sure what impact that will actually have with them, but I’m interested to see whether there’s an increase in motivation the next time they find that “gotta have it” item and don’t have the money to buy it.