Amherst Center: Lessons for town in kids' allowance debate

Published on August 29, 2008

We may be local policy wonks/politics junkies, but we're parents, too. Usually those things don't get mixed up together, but not too long ago one of us had a parenting and town management moment.

There we were, sitting at the dinner table after yet another Town Meeting, talking to the kids about how we'd struggled with the mismatch between things we want (like pools and schools and smooth streets) and what we have to spend (not enough). Yeah, we know, pure excitement at our dinner table.

Anyway, we were talking about how Amherst's revenues hadn't kept up with the costs of things, when one of our kids, not missing a beat or an opportunity, piped up, You know, that's just like us. Our allowance hasn't kept up with the cost of the stuff we want. Well. That'll teach us to talk town finance at the dinner table.

Of course the conversation devolved into a litany of examples from our childhood. How when we were their age, we survived on $1/week allowance (considered very extravagant at the time). How we had to make that last for comic books and candy for a whole week. And the latest Planet of the Apes movie. And we had to walk 6 miles uphill in driving snowstorms to get to school each day. You know the drill.

After dinner though, we had to give the allowance question some thought. Just like the town, which has a citizens committee looking at Amherst's allowance right now, we decided to do a little research to find out what the best practice was.

We surveyed a range of Amherst parents and the parents we talked to certainly had a range of approaches.

From one end of the spectrum:

We give the boys 50 cents/week. Seriously. They are clearly oblivious, and inevitably someone will realize that it s not 1952.

To the other end of the spectrum:

We used to give our daughter a weekly allowance that matched her age (6 year old gets $6), which got really expensive really quickly. Then, we switched to her grade, which proved to be a bit skimpy. We now give our 13 year old $10/week.

To the tortured:

My parents made it a practice to use money as a replacement for love, as a hammer, a sedative, a way to manipulate and coerce. Now I find that their money-as-a-tool-to-control-their-children legacy lives on from a grave in the Bronx. I think I may start to apply a new filter on the allowance question such as: How much money can I raise to pay for my therapy bills by dressing up my kids in lederhosen and having them sing a little Yiddish tune for passers-by on the upper east side of New York City.

The most interesting data was a simple analysis of the effect of inflation: the $1/week allowance that we received in 1972 has the buying power of 20 cents today. When we'd been thinking about our kids allowances, we d been living in our rosy past, not the reality of today's costs. That movie costs $7, not the $1.50 of our youth. And an Archie comic book? $2.95, not 25 cents!

Parenting is tough work, but truly worth it. The same goes for the work of funding our town. The challenge in either case is to set our allowance to fit our 21st century reality.

What are the fundamental needs that should be paid for? What do these things cost in today s terms? Are we being realistic about costs, or are we living in rosy memories from our past?

How do we sort out wants from needs? What other extras should we pay for, and when should we just say no?

These are questions that need to be answered in order to develop a good budget, and we support the conversations the Town Manager and the Budget Choices Committee have begun on the topic. Whether we are talking about our town or our kids, it s an eerily similar discussion, but an important one to have here in Amherst Center.

Amherst Center is a monthly column which appears in The Amherst Bulletin that seeks to portray local issues from a centrist perspective. It is written by Town Meeting members Baer Tierkel and Clare Bertrand and School Committee member Andy Churchill. Amherst Center appears in The Amherst Bulletin on the last Friday of each month.