I must be of a certain age as I find it hard to believe that my teenager has nothing better to do than sit on the sofa watching DVD’s or in his room playing video games. I am sure I am not the only one with a teenager in the house who feels like this.
When I was a teenager I had a job every Saturday and when I got home with the wage packet I would give some of it to my mother. We weren’t poor but I knew then and I know now that there were weeks when that extra money really helped her out with the family budget.
Whether or not your family would be helped by a weekly increase in cash flow you are probably thinking that there must be some ways for teens to make money that they can then use to support themselves. If they have money of their own then they don’t need any from you.
Allowing teenagers to make their own money and control how they spend it offers many benefits, over and above the fact that they don’t have to come and borrow from you if they have their own money. Teenagers earning their own money learn the value of hard work, they also learn that a dollar doesn’t stretch quite as far as they had thought it did.
I am not suggesting that you should throw your teenager out into the cold dark world without any support (although if they don’t turn that music down soon I may just do that). I am suggesting that you are helping them grow up by teaching them that money has to be earned, the tooth fair doesn’t keep on coming when you are 16 and 6 foot 4 inches tall!
You can help your teenager start making money right away but you need to make sure that they don’t end up just passing all the work off to you while they get the money. They will need your support initially but after the initial couple of jobs they should be able to stand on their own two feet.
The first thing you need to do is sit down with your Teenager and discuss the fact that they need to start earning some money to help support themselves and if you are in severe financial problems then they need to start kicking in some money to the family budget. If you lose your house because you can’t pay the mortgage then they will have nowhere to play their video games will they?