MARY ANN FITZMORRIS / L’Observateur / September 30, 2000

The house is a whirlwind of math activity these days. We’re talking compounding interest and matching funds, and my son voluntarily took out a piece of paper to add and subtract numbers, with decimals! The children are eager to make money and watch it grow. All of this is thrilling. It would be more thrilling if it weren’t so expensive for me.Recently in a local toy store my son noticed the Nikko remote control speed boat he’s been drooling over. The price is way out of his league.He grabbed the remaining birthday money, which amounted to $30, and I offered to match his sum if he was willing to earn the other $30.

This threw him into such an excited frenzy that in short order I offered him $3 just to shut up for five minutes. I was thinking what a bargain that was as I paid him off, until he interrupted my thoughts by asking if I would match that $3.

My daughter was paying excessive attention to this conversation, so I was only mildly surprised later when she asked how much I’d pay her to get something out of the car for me. I responded by pushing her out the door and locking it, but I did offer her 50 cents later that evening to rinse some potatoes and place them in a pot for dinner. “Will you match it?” she inquired, demonstrating that she understood the concept as little as her brother did.

My son came to me with a mini-math page calculating that he now had $60, assuming the matching fairy had visited again. I offered him $5 to shut up foranother ten minutes.

He has definitely latched on to this idea of making money without really working. He has also picked up on the idea of making money with the money in hand, aside from popular matching of funds. Yesterday in the car I had to stop for something and was short a few dollars. He politely offered financial help, since he just happened to be carrying his cache of money, hoping the car might pull into the parking lot of that toy store. As I was thinking how sweet he had been to offer help, he informed me that he was charging me $2 interest.

“Interest? What’s interest? Is that like matching, Mommy?” my daughter asked from the back seat. I offered her a dollar to shut up about matching.Later that night I apprised my husband of the situation. He felt a need to show my son that work is the way to get money. We decided to offer my son smaller jobs for smaller money in an effort to ease him into the household work force.

He began to squeeze clever Dad a glass of fresh orange juice every morning, a job I would gladly pay anyone $10 to take from me. My spouse gives him a dollar for this. Fortunately, he hasn’t asked me to match it.Through this and other small jobs the filial coffers have grown to the point where, after a visit from the Matching Fairy, he’ll soon have enough for the purchase of the prized boat.

And we’ve all learned from this experience. Besides a little basic math, the children have learned about saving, investing and the valuable American concept of the overinflated dollar.

But perhaps the most important thing they’ve discovered is that, with the proper amount of Parental Manipulation, a kid can carve out a nice little nest egg, even if the Matching Fairy is on vacation.

My daughter has really caught on to this. She follows every directive of mine with, “What will you pay me?” Now that all household relations have moved to the Pecuniary System, I’m left to wonder two things. How much should I charge for getting them a glass of water? And, who will match it?

Back to Top

Back to Leisure Headlines

Copyright © #Thisyear# Wick Communications, Inc.Best viewed with 4.0 or higher