Should you pay your kids for chores? A guide for South African families

Bring this up around a braai and you’ll get two firm camps. One says a child should never be paid for washing a dish: you help because you live here. The other says nothing teaches the value of a rand like earning it, and money for nothing is exactly how you raise an entitled adult. Both camps are protecting something real, which is why the argument never ends.

The good news is that the research, and the experts on both sides of it, converge on a practical answer that keeps what each camp is right about. This guide walks through the evidence, what South African parents actually pay (honestly: the data is thin, and we’ll say so), and a setup you can run from this week.

The case for paying

The link between work and money is the whole argument, and it’s a good one. In the adult world, money arrives because effort was spent, and a child who has only ever received money as a gift has practised half of the skill. The loudest voice here is the American money coach Dave Ramsey, who tells parents to put kids “on commission”: a list of jobs with prices, paid when the work is done, nothing paid when it isn’t.

There’s empirical backing for the suspicion that no-strings money teaches the least. The financial-literacy researcher Lewis Mandell reviewed decades of allowance studies and found that children given a regular unconditional allowance tended to score lowest on financial literacy, lower than kids who earned their money and even lower than kids who got none at all. Money that simply appears doesn’t ask the child to think about where money comes from.

The case against

The against camp has the weight of motivation science behind it. A famous meta-analysis of 128 experiments by Deci, Koestner and Ryan found that expected, tangible rewards reliably undermine people’s intrinsic interest in the rewarded activity: pay someone for a thing and you quietly teach them the thing is only worth doing for pay. It shows up startlingly early. In a well-known study by Warneken and Tomasello, toddlers of twenty months who were rewarded for helping an adult became less likely to help again than toddlers who got a smile or nothing at all.

Ron Lieber, the New York Times money columnist whose book The Opposite of Spoiled shaped how a generation of parents think about this, adds the practical version of the objection: if all pocket money is wages, a child can simply resign. “I don’t need money this week” becomes “I’m not helping this week,” and now the dishes are a negotiation. Chores, in his view, are done because you’re part of the household, and the money lessons should be taught with money that arrives predictably.

Chores matter either way

Before resolving the pay question, it’s worth saying that the chores themselves are not optional equipment. A University of Minnesota analysis by Marty Rossmann, following children into their mid-twenties, found that starting chores at age three or four was one of the best predictors of adult success, stronger than starting them as a teenager. And the long-running Harvard Study of Adult Development is widely cited, by the former Stanford dean Julie Lythcott-Haims among others, for the finding that professional success grows out of a childhood work ethic, the kind chores build. Whatever you decide about money, the jobs stay.

The hybrid both camps already agree on

Here’s the part that gets lost in the braai argument: the two camps converge in practice. Lieber, the standard-bearer for “don’t tie pocket money to chores,” is explicit that parents can pay for the extra jobs, the unusual ones nobody expects of a child: washing the car properly, a Saturday of garden clean-up, sorting the garage. And Ramsey, the standard-bearer for commission, concedes that some jobs must stay unpaid “because you’re part of the family.” Strip the branding and they’re describing the same setup:

• Family duties, never paid. Make your bed, clear your plate, keep your room liveable, help carry the shopping in. These are the membership fees of the household, and paying for them would teach a transactional family model.
• Paid jobs, priced upfront. A separate, visible list of above-and-beyond jobs with a rand amount on each: car wash, garden bags, washing windows, an afternoon of weeding. Work done, money paid. Work not done, nothing owed and nothing nagged.
• A base of pocket money on a fixed payday, so there’s always a steady income to budget with even in a week with no paid jobs. We cover choosing that number in our pocket-money guide.

This is also exactly the deal adults live under: you contribute to your household for free, you get paid for your job, and extra effort earns extra money. The psychology holds up too, because you only ever attach money to the optional jobs. The behaviour you want internalised, pitching in because the family is a team, never has a price tag on it, so there’s nothing for a reward to undermine.

What South African parents actually pay

Honesty first: South Africa has no equivalent of the big annual American allowance surveys, so nobody can tell you the national average for a washed car. The last proper survey we could find is nearly two decades old, a 2007 Synovate study which found that about a third of SA children got a set amount of pocket money monthly, roughly a quarter got whatever their parents could afford that month, and almost half did chores to earn their money. Everything more recent is parents comparing notes, so treat the ranges below as a starting grid, not a rate card:

Two local distinctions worth keeping straight. Daily tuck-shop money is spending money, not earned money; if the R10 for the tuck shop arrives automatically every morning, it belongs in the pocket-money column, not the chores column. And if your household employs a domestic worker, the point of kids’ chores doesn’t disappear, it sharpens: keep a core of jobs that are theirs alone, especially the ones about looking after their own things, because the lesson is contribution and self-sufficiency, not cheap labour.

The South African wrinkles

SA family money runs on a monthly rhythm, because salaries do. That’s fine for teens, but young children live in weekly time, so consider paying the base pocket money weekly even if the paid-jobs money lands as it’s earned. And if some months are tighter than others, which that 2007 survey suggests is the reality for a quarter of SA families, protect the system rather than the number: a smaller base that always arrives teaches more than a generous one that sometimes doesn’t. Paid jobs are actually the flexible part, since the list can shrink in a lean month without breaking any promises.

How to set it up this week

Not sure which jobs suit which child? Our age-by-age chore list for kids runs the full ladder from four to eighteen, family duties and paid jobs included.

• Write the two lists with your child: family duties (unpaid) and paid jobs (priced).
• Keep the unpaid list short and non-negotiable; keep the paid list optional.
• Put a rand price on every paid job before anyone starts working.
• Pay fast: approve the work, hand over the money, same day.
• Keep a steady pocket-money base on a fixed payday, separate from job money.
• Never dock chore pay for behaviour; keep discipline and earning separate.
• Review the lists and prices once a year, on their birthday.

The bottom line

Don’t pay for belonging, do pay for hustle. Family duties stay free because that’s what family is; extra jobs carry honest prices because that’s what work is. Your child gets both lessons instead of one, and you get out of the daily negotiation business.

Savella’s chore app for kids runs this exact model: family duties and priced jobs on separate lists, work submitted from your child’s side, and the money landing in their balance the moment you approve it. Join the beta waitlist and set up your two lists the evening your invite lands.