SATURDAY PENNIES FOR JUNIOR

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVI, Issue 21380, 24 June 1939, Page 9

SATURDAY PENNIES FOR JUNIOR

Every child should be given weekly pocket money, because learning to spend it wisely is part of his education and also for the minor—but to the child very important—reason that it makes him feel independent and grown up. Once you have decided how much pocket money to give your small son every week, treat it as a debt, and never let him have to ask for it. Give him the feeling that his pennies are due to him, just as the weekly money is due to the milkman every Saturday. Let him be completely free to spend his small allowance as he pleases—not continually reminded of the fact that coloured pencils will outlast the best ice-cream. Don’t try to make a small child thrifty. When you tell the five or six-year-old to put his pennies in the savings box, he will look at you in blank amazement. He can’t understand the meaning of “saving for a rainy day.” for to-morrow is a thing which simply does not exist for that age. The issue becomes more complicated as the child grows older. How are you to clarify his sense of values, how can you teach him he ought to save for the future, and how, above all, are you to teach him the responsibility which the spending of every allowance, no matter how small, involves? He may be in the habit of spending his whole allowance in a lump sum for something that at the time absorbs his interest completely. Result, he is broke for the rest of the week; and if a film he dearly wants to see happens to be at the local cinema, or his father’s birthday is near at hand, it is a great dilemma not only for him but also for his mother. Mother reasons that as he has spent all his money on constructing an aeroplane he is spending it on something useful. Under the circumstances it is difficult to refuse him the few extra pennies for him to buy his father the the birthday present. But this is not good policy. It is encouraging the child to be one of those people who can’t live on their income. Teach the child to budget his money. This will help him to look ahead and plan for the future, and secondly, to make a wise choice. The budget being elastic, the boy will not feel cramped in his style and endeavour to investigate possibilities which otherwise would have been beyond his resources. Weighing these possibilities against each other will increase not only his sense of proportion but also augment his responsibility and the intenseness of his imagination.