Unschooling's Allowance for Real Math

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Unschooling’s Allowance for Real Math

How do they learn math in unschooling? This is a valid question. Let me share with you how our son learned real math, the kind of math that teaches values around math—not just mathematical values, but values about money as a resource and as a tool. Let me take you on an unschooler’s journey through the foggy haze called math, using money, and more specifically a seven-year-old’s weekly allowance.

One Saturday morning, my husband Marc showed me an article in The Globe and Mail about giving your child allowance. The article suggested one dollar for every year of the child’s age. This sounds preposterous, you might say, as I did, realizing that our seven-year-old son would get a whopping $7.00! And if you have more than one child, each of them would get various amounts, totalling a pretty penny! How can I afford to give each of my children this much money? My question is: How can you afford not to?

Let me explain...if you are homeschooling or unschooling, or whatever combination of the two you happen to do, then what is money? It is a resource, one you use daily in the running of your household and your life. Children see us use this resource, and they watch carefully how we use it. What messages are we giving our children about money? How unconsiously do we reach into our pockets to shell out for whatever little trinket our child desires? And if we don’t, certainly there are treats. Well, the thrust of this Globe and Mail article is, if your child has a certain amount of money, she must learn to manage it.

Stanley and Danko (1996) in The Millionaire Next Door, explain how we train our children around money. They talk about how we give and give and then one day our children come to expect our continued financial support in the form of what they term "economic out-patient care" (p. 142). All the money decisions have been made for them, with our money and they come to see our funding as an eternal well-spring. If they have never made financial decisions for themselves, suddenly coming into a large sum of money will be overwhelming and the decisions they make may well be the wrong ones.

So, you give your child $7.00 (seven dollars!) and here is where the real math education begins. The only stipulation is that a certain percentage must be saved for long term goals (future education, for example) while another percentage may be saved for something special (a new Lego toy, for example), and the rest used for whatever immediate expenditures the child chooses. And this is a difficult one: are you prepared to watch your child purchase five dollars worth of candies, chocolate and the like? I was, and it was difficult. But the learning was priceless.

One week, Cristan spent all his money on candy, so for the next week when he asked me for something, I pointed out that his allowance was spent. He is learning, the hands-on way, that candy is something you eat and have nothing to show for your money. He did not do that again.

On a visit to Grandma, Cristan had no socks on his feet, telling me he had forgotten to put them on. Several days earlier we had discussed how the weather is changing and requires that Cristan now wear socks with his running shoes. Concurrent with the mother guilt, I felt obliged to give Grandma $3.00 to buy socks on their outing. I later found the socks I had given Cristan to wear that day, stuffed beside our sofa—he had not wanted to wear them. So, I carved a math and money lesson out of this situation: "Cristan, you deceived me about the socks, saying you had forgotten to put them on. Truth is, you did not want to wear socks. I ended up having to buy them for you and they cost $3.00 dollars. Your allowance this week is $7.00 and I would like you to pay for the socks. How much will this leave you?" He comes up with $4.00 and learns that this is what his allowance will be for the week. Deception involves a price. So, he is learning about moral values, money values, and math values simultaneously. What workbook page could I find this lesson on?

Yes, he has to keep his room clean, and he has to help with the household chores. We choose not to link this to getting his allowance for now. There is time enough for those lessons; the more pressing lesson is that money comes in and goes out and how do we handle this reality?

And other lessons arise using Cristan's allowance. . . . We scour garage sales for deals and often he will come to me with an item such as a complete Lego set, that he knows would cost so much more in the store (comparing). I then tell him to look at the ticket price and halve it, asking if the owner will come down in price. He knows that if he pays too much for something, then he will spend all his resources. Again, these are values around money. Our son is learning division, fractions and negotiating.

When he was 7 years old, I was involved in a conversation about how much Cristan gets for his allowance with him and with his little friend next door, who was also 7 at the time. She wanted to know why he got $7.00, so I told her that we wanted Cristan to learn how to manage money. He then piped up "I get $7.00 because I am 7 years old, and when I am 10, I will get ten dollars, and when I am 12, I will get twelve dollars, and when I am 100, I will get a hundred dollars!" Not from Mom and Dad, but hopefully the lessons learned at this tender age, in the safety net of home will eventually net the grown man a fortune in important values--mathematical and otherwise.

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