Deb Knight weighs in on an ‘age-old’ pocket money question

It’s an age-old question: how much pocket money should I give my children, and what are the jobs they should do to get it? 
The answer to that question has changed dramatically over the years. 
ING Bank has researched pocket money with 1000 of their customers, and the results are intriguing. 
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The majority of Australian families or 57 per cent, say they pay their children pocket money, and an even greater number, 73 per cent, believe kids must help out around the house or do chores to earn that money. 
There’s also a direct link between the age of the child and the amount of pocket money they receive. 
On average five- to seven-year-olds earn $6.50 a week, eight to 10-year-olds pocket $10.30 a week, 11 to 15-year-olds receive $15.60 a week, and 16 to 18-year-olds are raking in around $22.70 per week.
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Those amounts are vastly different to what the parents and grandparents of today earned when they were growing up. 
The research revealed that Boomers on average earned $3.40 a week, Gen X $9.90 a week, Millennials $11.20 a week and the kids of today Gen Z and Gen Alpha earn $11.90 a week.
So just as the cost of living has gone up, so too has the amount earned by children, who pocket on average around $750 dollars a year. The benefits of pocket money however remain the same. 
The study suggests eight in 10 Australians learned important skills about saving from the pocket money they were paid, and seven in 10 say the weekly earnings from Mum and Dad were crucial to understanding budgeting, which put them in good stead for the rest of their lives. 
Key to those lessons is not just having to do the jobs to earn the money in the first place, but also understanding delayed gratification when you have to be patient to save for the thing you really want, and learning the hard lessons of financial failure. 
If you spend your pocket money all at once on lollies which are gone in a second or on a useless toy that your parents told you not to buy, which broke straight away, it’s hopefully a lesson you take with you into your adult years.
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The other issue with pocket money that differs across the generations is how the money is paid.
Just as the rise in digital payments is seeing a decline in the use of physical notes and coins across the board, the vast majority of children now also get their pocket money as an online payment, either into popular Spriggy accounts or into Youth accounts that banks like Westpac have established for those aged eight and over. 
Not having physical money can make it harder for children to understand what it means when the money is either saved or spent, but it does reflect the lessons they’ll need to learn in an era when cards and online payments dominate. 
The question now is – how do I get the kids to pick up their towels from the bedroom floor and hang them back up in the bathroom as a matter of course, rather than expecting to be paid to do the basics? 
That’s an even longer term life lesson.
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