When you’re a child, pocket money is great.
And when you’re an adult, it gets that little bit less great… and sometimes even a bit confusing if you’re a parent.
How much should you give your child?
Should it depend on age? How much they help around the house? How good they are in school? Or should it simply reflect how much money they need to have that little bit of independence we all so painfully crave when we’re young?
Honestly, there doesn’t seem to be a correct answer, but there are some statistics available as to what other parents are giving their children per week.
And some of the results were pretty surprising.
Now, the below study was conducted including parents living in the UK with children between the ages of 5 and 10, so we can probably go ahead and assume that the amounts would vary over here in Ireland.
Still though, the differences depending on where parents are living is stark.
For example, parents from Plymouth in the south of England give their children £1.23 pocket money per week or, in Euro, about €1.40.
Then, if you move up to Edinburgh in Scotland, kids are raking in an average of £4.53 every week.
What you’d be doing with all the cash, we don’t know.
The full list of averages across the UK is as follows:
- Edinburgh – £4.53
- Glasgow – £4.13
- Cardiff – £3.49
- Manchester – £3.21
- Bristol – £2.89
- Newcastle – £2.85
- Leeds – £2.77
- Belfast – £2.52
- London – £2.45
- Birmingham – £2.46
- Liverpool – £2.42
- Norwich – £2.40
- Brighton – £1.96
- Southampton – £1.77
- Nottingham – £1.69
- Sheffield – £1.62
- Plymouth – £1.23
The study, compiled by The Entertainer, also revealed that parents are most generous with cash when their kids wash the car, do the ironing, or do some gardening.
On the other side of it, children are most likely to clean their rooms in an attempt to get pocket money because, you know, no one wants to wash the car in fairness.
At the end of the day though, there’s no right or wrong amount of pocket money you should be giving your children.
Whatever you give should be appreciated and be enough so they can head down the shop and buy a pack of Tayto every now and then.
Or whatever kids are into these days.
Each to their own.
