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Should you give an allowance at all?

The arguments against are better than allowance guides admit. Here they are at full strength — and the narrower case that survives them.

By the Child Allowance team · Updated 19 September 2026 · 7 min read

Almost everything written about children and allowances is written by people who have already decided the answer is yes, which makes it useless for deciding. The objections are real, some of them are good, and a family that has thought about them and said no is not doing anything wrong.

So: the case against first, made as well as we can make it, and then what’s actually left of the case for.

The case against, taken seriously

It puts a price on family life. This is the strongest objection and it isn’t squeamishness. A household runs on people doing things for each other because they live there. Introduce payment and you introduce the question what do I get, and that question does not stay in the box you put it in. Paying for something a person already did willingly can replace the willingness rather than add to it — and the willingness does not reliably come back when the payment stops. How strong that effect is, and how far it generalises, is genuinely argued over; that it happens at all is the part worth worrying about.

It can teach that everything is transactional. A child who learns that effort is reimbursed has learned something true about employment and something false about families, and at eight they cannot yet tell which context they’re in.

Unearned money teaches nothing on its own. Money that simply arrives, with no work and no decisions attached, is not a lesson. It is an income, and plenty of children receive one for years and arrive at eighteen having learned precisely nothing from it.

Not every family can, and the gap is visible. An allowance is discretionary spending by definition. In a tight month it is the first thing to go, and an allowance that appears and disappears with the household budget teaches insecurity rather than planning.

Children get money anyway. Birthdays, grandparents, the odd note in a card. A family can teach everything worth teaching using that money, on a much smaller scale, and never run a system at all.

A household runs on people doing things for each other because they live there. Introducing payment introduces the question what do I get — and that question does not stay in the box you put it in.

The case for, which is narrower than it sounds

Now the other side — and note how much of it the objections have already conceded.

The case for an allowance is not that children deserve money, or that chores should be paid, or that it builds character. It is narrower and more mechanical than that: children cannot practise making decisions about money without money to make decisions about, and the practice has to happen while the stakes are small.

A mistake with £10 at nine costs £10 and a bad afternoon. The same mistake at nineteen, made for the first time, costs considerably more and arrives with a credit agreement attached. The allowance is not the lesson. It is the practice equipment, and the argument for it is that practice is better done early and cheaply.

That’s the whole case. It doesn’t require believing that chores should be paid, and it survives every objection above except the last two — which is worth being honest about.

What the objections are usually really about

When a parent says “I don’t want to pay my children to help”, they are almost always objecting to something specific rather than to allowances in general. It’s worth separating them, because three of the four have fixes.

The fourth has no fix, and it is the one case where not starting is the better call. An allowance whose survival depends on a good month teaches that money is unpredictable — the exact opposite of the intended lesson. A very small amount that never misses is worth far more than a generous one that sometimes does, and if even that isn’t reliable, wait.

The middle option almost nobody considers

There is a version that most of the objections don’t touch, and it rarely comes up because it doesn’t look like an allowance.

Hand over a category, not an income. Work out what you already spend on one slice of your child’s life — the cinema trips, the magazine habit, whatever gets bought on the way home from school — and give them that budget to run. Nothing is paid for chores. The household spends exactly what it spent before. But the decisions move, and the decisions were always the point.

This answers the transactional objection completely, because no work is being purchased. It answers the unearned-money objection, because the money isn’t a gift — it’s a responsibility, with things that now have to come out of it. What it doesn’t answer is affordability, since it costs the household nothing new but requires knowing the number.

How to decide in your own house

Three questions, and they settle it faster than any amount of reading.

Can you commit to the same day, every time, for six months? If not, don’t start. Unreliable is worse than none — it teaches that money depends on someone’s mood, and that’s a lesson you’d rather they didn’t have.

Is there anything they currently want that they could plausibly save for? If nothing is wanted, there is nothing for the system to work on, and it will be an administrative chore that teaches nobody anything. Wait until something is wanted.

Are you willing to watch them waste it? This is the real test. A parent who will step in and top up, or veto the silly purchase, cannot run an allowance — the scarcity is the entire mechanism, and rescuing them from it removes the only thing that was doing any work.

Three yeses and it will probably work. A no on the first or third means the honest answer is not yet, and not yet is a perfectly good answer. Most of the damage in this area is done by families who started a system they couldn’t sustain and taught, thoroughly, that money arrives at random.