Photo

Should parents tie allowance to the completion of regular chores?

It’s a question that is at least 100 years old.

On one side of the issue are the parents who believe that handing out allowance without tying it to work will lead to entitled children who don’t understand how the world works. On the other are parents who think kids should not expect payment for chores, since everyone ought to contribute to keeping the household running smoothly. For them (okay, me), allowance is a teaching tool and not a wage.

But in the most thought-provoking essay I read about parenting, money and values last year, a 35-year-old Seattle father named Jake Johnson suggested a third way. He and his wife expect their older son Liam, who was seven at the time Jake implemented his philosophy, to do chores without compensation. But they don’t give him a weekly allowance either. Instead, they pay him to do special one-off tasks.

I’ve run into a handful of parents who operate this way over the years. What makes the Johnson family unique is that Liam has to figure out for himself what work needs doing. In Jake’s post, which he titled “Raising Entrepreneurs,” he explained that employees sell their time to entrepreneurs in exchange for the performance of tasks. But he didn’t want Liam concluding that his time and chores are what is most valuable.

“In our house, you get paid for recognizing a problem and proposing a solution,” Jake wrote. “I’ve taught Liam that if he wants to make money, he has to pay attention to the world around him, identify a problem that needs fixing, and propose a solution. We then negotiate a payment.” Liam has since taken this approach with unraked leaves and family members’ dirty cars.

Not long after the essay appeared on Medium, Jake took it on the chin in a scathing post on Valleywag, the technology gossip website. Commenters there took particular offense to Mr. Johnson’s suggestion that Liam subcontract the actual car washing to his friends, paying them less than what Liam would receive from his customers. Jake later removed that advice from the essay.

I spoke to Jake this week to ask him more about the ideas in the essay and what he learned from the criticism. The edited and condensed transcript follows below.

Q.

Isn’t it possible to take pride from selling your time and your ability to perform tasks? I would accuse you of insulting every parent who happens to be an employee and not a founder, but you’re an employee yourself!

A.

In the essay, I mentioned that the best employees think entrepreneurially and made the caveat that I wasn’t talking about everyone. I think if I could do it all over again, I would have talked more about entrepreneurial thinking as opposed to being an entrepreneur. I’ve been an employee, owned my own business and worked with a number of people who have been employees who are awesome. They take pride and initiative in helping to build rather than just punching a clock.

Q.

How did you decide to frame all of this around problem recognition?

A.

What I’ve been taught about entrepreneurs who are successful is that they find a problem and propose a solution that people are willing to pay for. I couldn’t think of any successful business that doesn’t have that at its core. My hope for Liam is that he’ll be successful in life whether he’s an employee or starts his own thing at some point. But he’ll be most successful if he’s able to approach life with that kind of problem-solving mindset. He’ll help build a successful business or at least learn a lot of lessons in a failing one. Or he’ll be an asset in any organizaiton he works for by approaching work that way rather than just checking off items on a list.

Q.

So has Liam found any new problems to solve recently?

A.

He’s moved on from the car wash idea. I expected it. One of the things that probably didn’t come through in the essay is that there’s plenty of room for him to be driving this process. I knew that going in. It was about teaching him how to think, and a 7 year old is going to get bored or run into obstacles.

Now everyone in his school is into the Rainbow Loom rubber-band bracelets. He’s taken to doing that for hours at a time, and he got the idea that he wants to sell them. He’s gone about doing that by pestering the neighbors. We told him not to go over and sell them by cold-calling because that wasn’t polite and we don’t want them to feel manipulated into shelling out a few dollars. He wants to build a stand in the front yard now and put them on display, so we’re trying to think that through.

Q.

Have we reached the point where we’re fetishizing the word “entrepreneur,” or putting ourselves in danger, as parents, of making kids feel like failures if they can’t or don’t want to start something?

A.

Some of the pushback on the article had to do with the term becoming meaningless at this point. But that seemed like a certain Silicon Valley culture or context being brought into the discussion, and I’m not a part of that. I come out of real estate and marketing and design. I bring a completely different context to that word and what it means.

Q.

In one passage you put it this way: “Since he’s seven, the expectation isn’t that he creates a great business. It’s that he begins to change the way he thinks about money and business.” Change his thinking into what, exactly?

A.

I wanted him to change into looking at money as something that can be earned in different ways besides just going to work and putting in eight hours and then going home. And I don’t want him to think that money is something you’re entitled to. If I had a good editor, they would have taken the word “business” out because he’s not learning about business anyway. My hope was that he’d learn the value of money by having to think hard about how to make it.

Q.

Given that, what do you think you got wrong when you suggested that he hire his friends and pay them less than he was getting for the washing of the cars?

A.

I just got stuck in my cleverness. When I talked about that stuff, it was knowing that he probably wasn’t going to do it. It was just to have the hypothetical conversation with him. I took the criticism to heart, and I think the criticism was correct.

Q.

Some of the comments were vitriolic generally though. My assumption is that there are a lot of people reading technology sites who wish they could start their own successful companies but will never do it or have been thwarted in their efforts to do so. It probably doesn’t take much to tick them off. What do you think was at the core of those responses, emotionally?

A.

Employees are assets for those companies, and companies make a profit off of them. Some people approach the idea of making a profit with a lot of antipathy. I think it’s only worsened because of the way in which corporate culture has evolved over time. I had never heard of Valleywag, but when you get on a Gawker Media site, you expect to get lambasted a bit. And when you see people dropping F-bombs on your seven year old, saying how much your kid will grow up to hate you, you want to wash your hands and dust yourself off and walk away.

Q.

So no more writing about your kids in public?

A.

I think as a writer in general, you deal with how to write about the things in your life without destroying your relationships. Kids bring a more interesting element because they don’t really have any say in the matter necessarily. This definitely gave me pause. I don’t want him Googling himself one day and seeing that, but I don’t have an answer yet. I don’t think many people do. I think all of us jumped into the internet and social media world with abandon, and now we’re all taking a second glance at what we’re doing.

Q.

Liam was seven years old when you had these conversations about money. Aren’t you taking all of this a bit seriously? Can’t we protect our kids from all of this just a little bit longer?

A.

He’s the one that brought it up! I had to figure out how I wanted to approach it when he came to me and said he wanted to start making some money and wanted to learn about money. My wife and I talked it through, and this is what we landed on. Like everyone else who’s a parent, you just start scrambling when you discover that your kids are already way ahead of you.