Allowance tracking on Palm?

In article ,
dragonlady wrote:
In article ,
David desJardins wrote:

Kevin Karplus writes:
I don't quite understand the point of giving kids an allowance and
then telling them how to s

We also allow our son to have the school lunch once a week. The $2
for the lunch is not part of his allowance---it is lunch money that he
has no control over (other than choosing which day of the week he'll
have the school lunch).

This seems exactly the same as "giving [him] an allowance and telling
[him] how to spend it", except that you decide not to call it an
"allowance". Isn't that a purely semantic distinction?

I have a different question about this: if he were to decide to pack a
lunch or just not eat lunch, could he keep the $2?

No, he is not allowed to skip lunch and pocket the money---it isn't
his money and that would be stealing. We would feel the same way if he
tried to sell his clothes or his bike for cash---these are things he
has the exclusive right to use, but not to get rid of.

Because he does not have the option of spending his school lunch money
or not, we don't think of it as part of his allowance. I'm sure if
you gave him the choice he'd prefer to have $2 to eating
lunch---already he often ends up eating his box lunches from home
after school because he was too busy at lunchtime to eat.

We've had no trouble with him using the lunch money inappropriately.
He already understands the notion of limited resources and limited
privileges: 1 hour of "screen time" a day, one candy a day, one school
lunch per week, ... . He gets some say in when he can exercise these
privileges (though not complete say---no candy just before dinner, no
screen time until homework is done, ... ).

--
Kevin Karplus http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus
life member (LAB, Adventure Cycling, American Youth Hostels)
Effective Cycling Instructor #218-ck (lapsed)
Professor of Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz
Undergraduate and Graduate Director, Bioinformatics
Affiliations for identification only.