Money, Parenting

The Marble Jar: An Allowance Alternative

Written by Guest Blogger – Carla Elkman – to read this article in its entirety, please visit Carla’s blog – Cobweb Corner

Many years ago my friend introduced me to an alternative to the standard weekly allowance. At the time my daughter was about five and we were giving her a weekly allowance of a few dollars if she did her ‘chores’.

Basically it went like this on Saturdays. Question “Did you do all of your chores this week?” Reply “Yes”. Question: “Are you sure?” Reply: “Yes”. Response: “OK, here’s your allowance.”

Of course it was a little more than that, we would ask what she did to deserve her allowance etc. But still, I didn’t like the format and wanted to try something different.

Thus – the MARBLE JAR.The concept is simple. You have two jars. You put marbles in one jar. Whenever your child performs a chore or does something ‘marble worthy’, they get to move one or more marbles from the ‘full’ jar to the ‘empty’ jar. When all of the marbles have been moved they get their allowance, or ‘reward’.

One major catch: If your child does something wrong, they have to move one or more marbles BACK to the beginning jar.

I can honestly say – I LOVE this system, and we’re actually still using it at age 14! It made a huge difference in how we handled allowance and punishments.

Here’s how we really made it work:

Continued….

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