Book #63: The Entitlement Trap by Richard and Linda Eyre

I've read a few of the Eyres' parenting books now and I always come away inspired with lots of ideas of things I want to do. This book mainly focuses on their ideas for a "family economy" to give your kids experience with handling and using money but making them earn their money and use it to pay for things they want and need, like clothes, toys, snacks, and doing stuff with their friends. They emphasize the importance of kids feeling and having "ownership" over their own activities and possessions and spend most of the book discussing how they can feel that ownership over different aspects of their lives (the first half is about their things, but the second half is about ownership of values, decisions, bodies, relationships, etc.). They have to earn their money by completing their routine chores every day during the week (but other things are done just for belonging to the family). I feel like this system sounds like a lot of work but actually really important for teaching these skills and knowledge. I know I want to do some variation on this when our kids get older (they suggest eight).

Reading this book has prompted a lot of discussion between Tommy and I about what we did as kids. Tommy's family sounds a lot like this system, whereas mine was a lot more loose and we got just a few dollars of allowance each month. I think my family's system was fine but the problem with me was that I would just "borrow" (aka take) money from my mom all the time and never tried to curb my spending to fit what I had, since I only had like $20 which was definitely not enough to cover any sort of spending. I still kind of have an aversion to giving kids tons of money for "allowance," but I think if it goes along with the sort of instruction and discussion that they have in this book, about being responsible and expecting that you pay for your own things and expecting them to pay for their own toys and clothes, then it makes sense and will actually help them build better habits in the future. I feel like I got lucky that I'm naturally not a big spender anyway.

DEFINITELY want to revisit this book in a few years when Dane is closer to eight to remind myself of these ideas. A lot of them are not applicable now but will be very useful around then (the whole money thing, talking to your kids about their bodies/sex, the repenting bench (which I would love to implement now but Graham is definitely not capable of that level of thought)).