Poor little blog, how I have neglected you lately! And to return with something as banal and sordid as pocket money!
Dudelet has been aware for a while that many of his peers are getting pocket money and a few months ago, we started letting him have a pound a week in a vague sort of way. I say vague because sometimes he’d forget and we’d have to remind him and sometimes we’d all forget for weeks on end.
Sigh. Innocence about money is even more of a core part of childhood than innocence about sex. Adam and Eve didn’t eat the apple and suddenly realise they were naked – they took a bite and immediately wanted a regular allowance.
Anyway, he’s lately been been insisting on his rights and he appears to be keeping a mental tally.
“You owe me £2.60.”
“Why?”
“You haven’t given me any pocket money for weeks and I only spent 40p on those sweets from the green shop.”
We’re uncomfortable, though, with the idea of him getting something for nothing. It seems like a poor life lesson. At the same time, we don’t like the idea of everything being conditional – love isn’t conditional, feeding him isn’t conditional and the house having to be (sort-of) clean isn’t conditional. Why can’t he spontaneously tidy his room and “be good” and we’ll spontaneously present him with money with no pernicious causality inserting itself in between?
Why can’t we live in Eden?
Well, we can’t and nobody else seems to either. A quick straw poll on Twitter came up with
- No pocket money
- Pocket conditional on chores done
- A set amount attached to a system of deductions for poor behaviour
- Allowances for certain desirable items
- Amounts of money ranging from 50p to £2
For older children (dudelet is 6), it gets even more complicated. I’m not going there until I have to.
I did look up some resources on the Interweb. None of the following are particularly useful. The BBC make it sound very simple:
While your child’s at primary school, a fixed amount each week is reasonable.
The Children’s Mutual offers guides, child friendly saving funds and even online pocket money “petz” (because children can’t spell?). The government of Australia reckon “it depends” and the British Council have an entire language lesson plan on pester power. So now I can teach Estonians how to give pocket money to their children. Didn’t help me with mine, though. There are whole books about this on Amazon which I can’t be bothered to list.
As ever, we spent some time in discussion with dudelet and came up with the idea of a chart (his suggestion) where he’d draw a coin on each occasion he’d been acknowledged to be ‘good’ and two coins when he’d been ‘very good’. Supernanny would have found the occasions shockingly ill-defined but this turned out not to matter as the chart only lasted two days. Then he scrubbed it out in a fit of rage because he’d earned one coin for being wonderfully helpful in getting little elf ready for the childminders and leaving the house on time but I hadn’t told him about it. No-one has spoken about the chart since.
He has, however, drawn little paper charts with fifteen boxes on for supermum and me and bought a stamp saying ‘Well done’ with this week’s £1 (we seem to be sticking with the £1). So far, I’ve earned two stamps and supermum is on one. Hopefully, we’ll get some pocket money of our own if we can keep this up.
You’re probably gathering that the whole business is in flux. Welcome to our world. Meanwhile, we’re tentatively introducing the idea that if he wants something expensive, he’ll have to save up. He has a purse which he loves storing coins in so I think the idea appeals to him. I feel he’s too young for us to really pressure the ‘money for chores’ business and we’d rather he learnt to tidy up after himself because that’s what “being part of a family is all about” than because we pay him to.
We haven’t a clue, have we? Just imagine the confusion when we try and deal with sex.
So what are you doing? You must have a better idea than we have…
The wonderful Noble Savage left a nice comment on my Confessions post about me and Tori Amos.
It’s a weird thing because Tori is at utter odds with most of my listening but I’ve got almost everything she’s released. The song ‘Playboy Momma’ made me cry when I first heard it and I suspect that album – “Songs From The Choirgirl Motel – is possibly my favourite. Wish she’d edit a bit these days, though.
I’m falling in love – aesthetically – with another female singer more and more these days, though – Bjork and especially “Vespertine”. With Bjork in general and “Vespertine” in particular, I wonder whether it is to do with the lack of the maturity? confidence? courage? to deal with the self-examination and challenge of a powerful woman dealing with complex issues of love, sexual and otherwise. I used to utterly put down Bjork ( “That’s not a tune, it’s a Bjork”) and could be very cutting to people foolish enough to admit liking her music in my presence. Why? I think I was scared of embracing the music of a strong female artist who celebrates her life and psyche so completely and honestly. Tori Amos is no different as a human being, I’m sure, but much of her work chronicles damage and survival. It’s easier on the sense of requiring less emotional work to relate to that if you’re me.
Oh, and if you’re reading this and you remember some bitter little squib sneering because you idly mentioned that Venus As A Boy was a pretty good tune, sorry. I was wrong. Still not too fond of that particular song though.
(from Oxford Circus on my iPhone, hence any typos.)
This is a post that JoBart re-published on her blog before Christmas, having first read it (and received permission to republish – see below for details) first on Frogpondsrock.
The video is very powerful, very understated and quite devastatingly convincing.
We need to use less plastic in our house and look very carefully at exactly how what we do use is recycled. Am feeling rather ashamed of one or two of our purchases over the weekend.
Plastic Beach
In the Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a king who was cursed to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this throughout eternity.
A beach cleanup on Midway Atoll made us feel just like Sisyphus.
There are millions of tons of plastics present in our oceans, and these are constantly fragmenting into smaller and smaller pieces which are scattered throughout the water column and present, in different densities, throughout all the worlds oceans.
Contrary to what many people believe, there are no visible islands of trash anywhere –even if some areas, the gyres, accumulate higher densities of plastic pollution. In actuality, what is happening is much more complex and scary: our oceans are becoming a planetary soup laced with plastic.
To make thing worse, these tiny pieces of plastic are extremely powerful chemical accumulators for organic persistent pollutants present in ambient sea water such as DDE’s and PCB’s. The whole food chain, invertebrates, fish, sea turtles… are eating plastic and /or other animals who have plastic in them. This means that we are. Like the albatrosses on Midway, we carry the garbage patch inside of us.
Cleaning up this mess is not feasible, technically or economically. Even if all the boats in the world were put to the task somehow, the cleanup would not only remove the plastics but also the plankton, which is the base of the food chain, and is responsible for capturing half of the CO2 of our atmosphere and generating half of the oxygen we need to breathe.
But even if this problem was solved too somehow, the amount of plastic that we could capture, at an immense cost, would be a drop in the bucket as compared to the amount that flows into the ocean every day.
No matter how hard we push, in terms of technology or money, the boulder will be rolling back down the hill, throughout eternity, unless we stop putting more plastics into our environment.
The good news is that we can do this. We can do this now. We need to start a social movement that spreads virally and creates a critical mass of concerned citizens who pledge to move away from our disposable habits, and who raise their voice to reject and reverse a throwaway culture that might be profitable, but whose consequences are intolerable.
Video by Jan Vozenilek
Written and narrated by: Manuel Maqueda
Music by Christen Lien www.itsnotaviolin.com
Click here to see a satellite image of the exact location of this video (click on ‘view map’ and zoom all the way in.)
Kim of Frogpondsrock received permission to reproduce this article, on her blog with the following conditions.
Hello! You are free to repost the text as long as you give attribution, do not alter the original text, mention where it was originally published, and include a link to the original post. You must also allow others to do the same (you cannot claim a copyright of the reposting). You are also free to quote, extract, mention, etc.
You are also more that welcome to embed the video. Thank you for asking, and thank you so much for helping us spread this message!
Kim goes on to say “You my dear readers may do the same. Please lets see if we can get this message out to as many people as we possibly can. I know that I can’t stop the polar ice caps from melting but I can drastically reduce the amount of plastic that I and my family use.”
I’m taking a quick time-out to claim my blog on Technorati – all the grown-up bloggers are doing it, so what the hell – but feel I’m short-changing people by not actually delivering content beyond an enigmatic code phrase (EDIT!). So I’m taking up Tara’s ‘Six Confessions’ meme in order to provide you with a little entertainment value for being suckered over here to read a post which really only exists because I need to prove I am who say I am. If you see what I mean. She copped it from someone called Adrenalyne from Norway, the name of whose blog makes me think of an old Sisters of Mercy song. I’ll have to check that out.
Anyway.
Some of you might argue that I confess quite enough to be going on with, thank you very much – is there anything left in the closet? Oh yes!
- I frequently wear Calvin Klein pyjama bottoms I bought in TK Maxx in bed. In fact, I tend to wear them up to the point I get dressed to go to work – I mean, I’ve got two children who wake up a lot and cats whose grasp of breakfast is easily confused. Sleeping au naturel (my pre-children preferred mode) just doesn’t work in a snowy January any more.
- Supermum and I are having sex again, more frequently than once every two years. I’m trying to resist marking the dates down on a calendar and she’s continuing to work very hard at finding me attractive at some point between 9 and 11ish on a Thursday or Saturday. Or occasionally a Friday. There’s a complete post in that somewhere. I’m fairly sure the pyjamas have nothing to do with it, though.
- I ate the last yoghurt. Sorry, dudelet.
- I have, on occasion, faked it. There’s a lot of sex in these confessions, isn’t there?
- I like Tori Amos. As an artist, that is.
- I have at least 50 partially read or unread books piled up by my bed. They include A Glastonbury Romance, by John Cowper Powys, a fantasy novel I can’t remember the name of, the Lotus Sutra, the Selected Poems of R.S. Thomas and the abysmal Sex Starved Marriage.
Am I supposed to tag anyone? There’s too much tagging in the world so I’ll go with the ‘anyone who comments, feel free’ cop-out.
