Our Chore Rewards System

What I mentioned in our last blog post seemed to spark some interest, I received some text messages about how we get kids to do chores if there is no money involved. Like I mentioned in our previous post, we reward them with food or other experiences besides toys and money. I'm not in anyway shape or form against giving your kids money and toys to get them to do their chores, but for our family it doesn't work. Our chores are broken down into a point system- 7 points, 14 points, 21 points, and so on. At seven points our kids are allowed a special snack of their choosing, I should mention this only works if you don't already buy snacks we only get healthy snacks so our kids are pretty pumped when I say they can have their very own bag of chips. At fourteen points they move up a bracket and can get something from their favorite restaurant, normally Chick-Fil-A, again this only works if you don't go there every other day. Twenty one points and up is a bigger deal, we go to a Chuck E Cheese like place(it's local so I can't say what it is) and they can cash in their points there. Most of our kids have decided to save their points for that and I'm extremely happy about it because honestly it's one of my favorite places to go. As they build up their points they'll have more "money" for games and food at this place and it excites them to know they get to go play arcade games-yea we're that old school family! A lot of people have asked why we just don't pay them and honestly it's because we don't have time to get cash out to give them and they don't really have a safe place to keep their money. It just makes it so much easier for us to do the point system and keep it all organized, this way we know how many points everyone has and what they want to use it towards. With that being said, if one of our kids came to us and said they wanted some crazy expensive toy we would allow them to use their points towards it. The only issue with that is they get jealous when their siblings are using their points at the arcade, it's a learning situation and we're happy to deal with it as it comes up. I'm just glad we found a chore system that works for our family, hopefully it'll work for a few years and I won't have to revisit it for awhile.