My kids love Friday: school lets out for the weekend, we might order pizza, and best of all, Dad opens his wallet and doles out allowances. Crisp bills or coins to shove in the piggy bank as the kids ponder their next purchase — or to drop in pockets as they pull on their coats and shout, "I'm going to walk to the store, OK, Mom?"

When our oldest child became big enough to begin receiving an allowance, we thought it was fairly simple. When he was three years old, Alex would help clear the table, clean his room and help with various other little chores, and at the end of the week he'd get money. Easy-peasy. Then Isaac came along and things got complicated.

Isaac is a born negotiator. When he was four, he started offering to do extra chores for extra allowance. At first, we were delighted; he was showing initiative, and things were getting done. But as he got older, he would request more money for any addition to his work, even though he was able to handle more chores as part of his basic workload. In the meantime, the other kids realized they could do less work if they were willing to accept less money.

I went looking on the Internet and the library shelves for professional advice about allowances and kids. I was looking for a fair system for allowance that would encourage kids to have a work ethic. Instead, I found a lot of advice about using allowances to teach children money management.

"Having a chore-allowance relationship is not recommended, since it takes away from the money skills that children might otherwise learn," advises money site MoneyInstructor.com. "Chores should be considered a family responsibility that should not be associated with money. . . . The purpose of an allowance is to teach money skills, and this may be lost if it is strictly tied to chores."

Paul Lermitte is a Vancouver financial adviser and author of the book Allowances, Dollars and Sense, and website paullermitte.com. Lermitte teaches that allowances are a money-management tool, not a pay system for chores or a reward for good behaviour. He says allowances can help kids learn to be good financial stewards as adults.

"I have observed that many adults do not know how to handle money responsibly. My hunch is that this is because they did not handle money enough when they were children," he writes. "They may have received an allowance, but it was used only to make small purchases. Unfortunately, they may never have learned how to save money for more expensive items or for long-term investments."

I never thought about the purpose of the allowance, to be honest. However, looking back, I realize my husband has been using the allowance to teach money skills from the beginning.

Clayton talks to the children every week about how much money they have in their piggy banks, and how much they need to buy things they want, or to do something special.

When one of the kids blows all of his money on candy one week, and can't afford a special toy the next, he asks them what they could have done differently to afford the item.

And when one of the kids asked to borrow money from another, he taught them about interest. (Isaac loves interest and will happily lend his money, but his rates are usurious and the other children have learned to turn down his loans except when desperate.)

My husband is on the right track, according to Lermitte's book, but he also suggests children should have bank accounts and learn to save and even invest.

"These lessons will help your children develop a much more comprehensive understanding of money and how to manage it," he writes.

Another issue is how much money to give the kids each week. Suggestions vary, but a common one is $1 or $2 per year of age. However, at our house that backfired when my five-year-old daughter basically argued that we were discriminating based on age.

The stuff she wanted to buy cost just as much as her brother's purchases, and she did an equivalent amount of housework. Why was she getting shortchanged? We had to admit she had a point.

Lermitte suggests simply picking an amount that works for both parent and child, and setting that, and all aspects of the allowance, down on paper in an allowance contract.

Before, we had a complex system where each kid earned a certain amount per chore, but that was too difficult to manage.

We did sit down and work out a better allowance system a few weeks ago, and are giving it a trial run now. Each child gets $2.50 a week, and they're due for a raise soon.

So far, the other kids have managed to avoid borrowing from the Bank of Isaac and have had fun with their money.

I think Clayton is relieved he no longer has to do complex math problems to figure out who gets how much each week.

cindy.macdougall@gmail.com

Allowance tips

• Chores should not be tied to allowance, says Vancouver financial planner and author Paul Lermitte, because doing chores are part of being a member of the family. However, kids looking to earn extra money could do work you normally pay to have done, such as yard work or washing the car. "Pay your child instead of paying

someone else to do it."

• Don't take away allowance for punishment. "Allowance is a tool to help them learn money-management skills for a lifetime. If they never get their allowance, they never get money and will never learn to manage it," says Lermitte.

• Don't allow siblings to lend money to each other or to friends, since it can lead to bad feelings.

• Help your children learn to save money and learn banking skills by opening a child bank account.