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Advantages and disadvantages of giving pocket money

Pocket Money, Should Parents develop this habit at the tender age?

We only remember the daily arguments we would do with our parents that would be no less than an experienced legal professional for increasing our daily allowance. This daily allowance has the popular name "pocket money".

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Pocket money is given to a child so that he may have some enjoyments of his choice within that amount of money. Very rightly pocket money gives a child a lesson of budget control. Keeping all expenses within a prescribed budget is a difficult task for a matured grown up as well as and so developing such awareness at a tender age is absolutely necessary. A person learns to get expertise from his mistakes. Budget control is a similar task. After exceeding ones predetermined budget couple of times a person would learn to keep the same within the budget. Similarly a child to taking his pocket money as his predetermined budget would learn to control his expenses. When a child is given his pocket money for the first time he would extravagantly spend the entire amount in short time. But gradually with passage of time with parental guidance, advice and scolding he would not only learn to keep his expenses within budget but also learn to save. And so parental supervision in a child's pocket money is extremely important.

The disadvantage behind giving a child, freedom in his expenses is he may opt for wrong things and it is also related to the company he keeps. Suppose a child has a bad company of friends and with his allowances he may go for smoking, drinking and other immoral activities out of curiosity with his friends.so, parental supervision and guidance is utmost necessary. Parents should give reasonable amount if allowance and only sometime little more as an appraisal for his child's performances in his academics or extracurricular activities. Pocket money can act as a motivational factor that is an extra remuneration to him for is brilliant performance in studies, sports, cultural activities etc. but the amount should not be abnormally high.

Again, a child lacks matured psychology that is he may not be able to understand the complexities of the society. Among his acquaintances he may find people coming from various classes, backgrounds and tastes. He may be under the proper guidance of his parents but some others may be not. He may have friends who receive abnormally high allowances and may be able to afford and enjoy things that this child is unable to. This creates a big problem. The child develops a grudge over his parents and suffers from low self-esteem. He may also adopt unfair means like stealing, bullying other children in order to raise his standard. A parent should also keep an eye on whether such situation has arisen and should not be rude with the child and explain to him the circumstances in a way that the child would understand as his judgmental power is not as justified as an adult. A parent should help him choose right friends. A parent also should help his child to learn his necessities as in order to get child of an out of budget product he may start saving by avoiding his necessities. In recent news we find a boy selling his kidney for an i-phone which his parents are unable to afford. Psychological counseling is required for a child in every step.

Thus as a conclusion it can be derived from the above analysis the lesson of "budget control" at a tender age will help a child to be expertise in the task only when he is under a close supervision of responsible parents who would suggest him ideas of budget control in his way. And no doubt such a practice from childhood will help him develop his own skills in the matter that would be immensely helpful for him in his future even when he would pass through adverse financial conditions.

So I sincerely feel that the parents should only provide a small emergency fund to their children so that they are left with a small window to peep into their ward's life and counsel him about what is right and what is wrong.

Sayantika Banerjee

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