Learn → Siblings, allowances and “that’s not fair”
Siblings, allowances and “that’s not fair”
Two children, two amounts, and one objection you will definitely hear. The answer isn’t to make the numbers equal — it’s to make the rule visible.
An allowance with one child is a teaching tool. An allowance with two or more is a teaching tool plus a permanent, running comparison that one of them is always losing. The second part is where families get stuck, and it has very little to do with money.
The good news is that the objection is answerable. Not by equalising the amounts — that creates worse problems than it solves — but by being able to state, in one sentence, the rule that produced the difference.
Equal and fair are not the same thing
Children raise fairness objections constantly, and the objection is almost never about the amount. It’s about whether the difference has a reason. A nine-year-old who receives less than her twelve-year-old brother is not, in general, upset about £4. She is checking whether the household runs on rules or on favouritism, and the amount is just the instrument she’s testing it with.
Which is why the winning answer is a rule rather than a reassurance. “You get more when you’re twelve, the same as he did” settles it, because it is checkable and it applies to her too. “You both get the same because I love you the same” does not settle it, because it isn’t responsive to the question and children can tell.
She isn’t upset about the money. She’s checking whether the household runs on rules or on favouritism — and the amount is just the instrument she’s testing it with.
Same amount, or scaled by age?
There are two defensible systems, and the mistake is running neither of them consistently rather than picking the wrong one.
Same amount for everyone
- Nothing to compare, so no weekly argument
- Simple to run and impossible to get wrong
- Younger child has more than they can use
- Older child has a genuine, unanswerable grievance
Scaled by age
- The difference has a reason you can state
- Every child eventually gets the bigger number
- Matches what the money actually has to cover
- Needs a stated rule, or it looks arbitrary
Scaling by age is the better default for any gap over about two years, for one reason: the younger child’s disadvantage is temporary and visibly so, while under a flat system the older child’s disadvantage is permanent. A fourteen-year-old on the same allowance as her seven-year-old brother is being asked to fund a genuinely more expensive life from the same money, and she is right to object.
Flat amounts work well in one case — children close in age, say within eighteen months, where scaling produces a difference too small to justify the arithmetic.
| Child | Scaled by age | Flat plus earned | What differs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Age 7 | £5 | £8 | Under flat, more money than they have uses for |
| Age 10 | £8 | £8 | The middle child is unaffected either way |
| Age 14 | £14 | £8 | Under flat, funds a costlier life from the same base |
The third column is the argument. Whatever you choose, write it down somewhere the children can see — a rule that exists only in a parent’s head gets re-litigated every payday, because from the outside it is indistinguishable from a whim.
The comparison you can’t prevent
Siblings will compare totals. You cannot prevent this, and trying to — by keeping amounts secret or forbidding the discussion — makes it worse, because secrecy implies there is something that wouldn’t survive scrutiny.
Make the amounts open and the reasoning open with them. A system that can be examined by everyone it applies to is a system that stops being argued about, usually within a month.
What is worth heading off is comparison of balances rather than rates. A child who saves and a child who spends will have wildly different totals within six weeks, and the spender will experience this as unfairness. It isn’t, and the moment is worth using: the difference between them is not what they were given, it is what they did with it. That is the clearest demonstration of the whole point of an allowance that you will ever get handed for free.
Lending, borrowing and sibling debt
Where there are siblings there is lending, usually initiated by the saver and regretted by the saver. A few positions worth taking before it happens rather than after.
Small loans between siblings are allowed, and you don’t enforce them. This sounds harsh and is the single most valuable rule in the section. A child who lends £5 to a sibling who doesn’t pay it back has learned something durable about lending money to people you love, at a price of £5. A parent who recovers the debt has bought that lesson back at their own expense.
Say it in advance. “If you lend it, that’s between you two — I won’t be getting it back for you.” Said before the loan, it’s a rule. Said after, it’s a betrayal.
No interest between siblings. The older child who works out that they can charge their brother for the privilege has genuinely understood lending, and you should say so — and then stop it, because the relationship is not a market and the power imbalance is real.
Advances come from you, not from each other. If a child needs money before payday, that’s a conversation with a parent about advances — ideally answered with no. Routing it through a sibling turns a small budgeting failure into a relationship problem.
When one child earns and the other doesn’t
The hardest sibling scenario isn’t unequal amounts. It’s one child doing every available job while the other does none and receives the base anyway.
First, check whether it’s actually a problem. The system is working exactly as designed: one child chose effort and has more money, the other chose free time and has less. If both are content with their trade, nothing needs fixing, and intervening teaches that choices get overridden when a parent dislikes the result.
It becomes a real problem in two cases. If the earner is hoovering up every job so there’s nothing left for anyone else, allocate some jobs by name rather than first-come. And if the non-earner is complaining about the gap, that complaint has an answer that is entirely fair and requires no adjustment at all: the jobs are there, they’re open, here’s the list.
What doesn’t work is capping the earner. A ceiling that exists to protect a sibling’s feelings teaches the child who did the work that effort is only rewarded up to the point where someone else minds — which is a thoroughly corrosive thing to learn at ten.
The older child’s real complaint
When an older child complains about a younger sibling’s allowance, the money is almost never the grievance. The grievance is usually that the responsibilities scaled with age and the privileges didn’t.
They are doing more jobs, being asked to be more reasonable, and getting £3 more a week for it. From where they’re standing, growing up has so far been a series of additional obligations with a modest cash uplift, and they have a point.
The fix is to make the uplift real rather than nominal. Bigger age gaps in the amount, yes, but more importantly a category of spending that is genuinely theirs to run and that the younger child doesn’t get — their own clothing budget, their own social spending, their own phone costs. Autonomy is the thing an older child actually wants, and it costs the household nothing extra to hand over money it was already spending.