The Guilt of the school holidays

Put your hand up if your at work right now and the little terrors beloved offspring are on holidays and being managed looked after by someone else.

My hand is up.

I didn't mean for it to be like this , I had every intention of being on holiday with them . But I have an excuse -  something came up which stopped me from being there. The problem is I always have something as an excuse.

I know there will be other holidays right ? And we have the weekends right?

Problem is I really do feel bad about it. School holidays are the one time that you should be together having fun and we have a rule in our family - its not a holiday unless everybody gets to relax.

Remember this post ? I mean it !

I still remember in exact detail the family holidays I had when I was a kid. If you guessed that's because of the ones we did actually manage they were so memorable, you'd be right. When both parents work it becomes a real challenge to get the clan organised.

Driving to Noosa back in the '80s - My Dad getting the tools from the car and unbolting the TV from the wall it was chained to, so he and Mum could watch TV in their room at night while I slept on the couch.

Two weeks in an apartment in Mornington, waiting whilst the rain passed, peering constantly out of the worst colored curtains I have ever seen and we completed a 10,000 piece jigsaw of some obscure mountain.

image courtesy of gold-coast-australia-travel-tips.com

Anyway you get the picture, they're cherished moments (even if they don't seem it at the time).

Things were different when I was younger, school holidays that we didn't get to go away or  get sent to a relatives house, were a chance to explore. We were allowed to go to the cinema by ourselves on the tram. We were allowed to ride our skateboards up and down the street all day.

Now days if you allowed that and your kids were under 14 you'd probably get arrested.

I know my family are having a great time and I know that they understand why I can't be there, but guilt is a funny emotion. It allows you to justify yourself and then creeps back and reminds you with that uncomfortable nagging feeling of uncertainty.

So as I sit here whilst the family are on holidays and I get another phone call from them swearing they are ok with me not being there ( I know they are just saying that) it spurs me into action to not let it happen again.

After all it's not good when I'm left on my own, as who knows what I'll do ?

My kids and pocket money

When I was a kid, I got 20 cents a week for doing chores around the house, it was great way to earn the money I wanted for the things I desired. As I got older I got increases until I realised that getting a job was going to be a much faster way of getting much needed funds. So a paper boy I became. And life was good.

So what about my two little guys. Well I figured what worked for me would work for them. As a fan of Freakonomics and exploring the hidden side of everything and incentives , we settled on $1 for each year of their age and there is a set of chores that needs to be done to earn the full amounts. I also had set a cut off of 15 as, by then just like I did they will be able to get a job ( I actually was working earlier but that's not the point ). At the start it worked really well.
Freakonomics recently had this short discussion piece on chores and income for them, and it made me think about how I paid pocket money to my two blokes.And more importantly ,

why aren't all the chores getting done ? 

For a start we decided that unless all the chores on the list were completed that the money wasn't paid. This didn't work and as I started to look at other ways to motivate them to do the actual work I find out that it's flawed to try to do so.
Here and Here are just a sample of the evidence on why rewards for effort can be flawed.

So then I thought "what I need is a way to calculate what chores have a real monetary value towards the running of the house and pay the little dudes for those"  Meh, I'm going in circles here.
Then quite by accident I discovered that introducing fun/technology into the task paid dividends.

Example  : Sweeping the leaves up. Very difficult to get interested in this as a broom and leaves are not fun or interesting, until that is until I introduced the leave blower/vac. Now its funny to chase the leaves around and vacuum them up. (Its also funny to take the catcher off and spread mulched leaves all over the back yard !

So now I'm off to try and find fun or unusual ways to get the rest of the chores done. And what do we pay them  as pocket money ? Well I figure it's nice to have some spending money when on holidays and frankly thats the only time they really need it. So that's what we do; give them some spending money at the start of each holiday and encourage them to learn manage their money.