The problem with giving a child an allowance is that it suggests a "something for nothing" mentality. An example of this is when parents have kids line up on Saturday and the kids say "give me my money". Kids need to learn that there is a connection between performance and reward.

Kids need to have some money because they need to learn how to spend it responsibly. We used to give our kids about $1 a year per age. We would save $1 and give a $1 at church, until they got to be teenagers.

I have traveled abroad quite extensively. One night at home some years ago, I was dumping change from my pocket, and some of the bills fell out too. My 4 year old daughter thought that these bills were all called “dollars”.

On Saturdays we go garage sale shopping and the kids take their own allowance money so they get to buy what they want. They have to negotiate if there is not a price on the item and I let them pay for their own item so they become familiar with what a nickel is, a quarter, etc.

I read in a parenting magazine that a helpful thing to cure "the gimmies" is to carry a small notebook in your bag and when you are going through a store, whether it's a toy store, book store or grocery store, and your child starts nagging for a certain item, instead of buying that item when

Every year when it was time to get ready for school or college, we always had a battle with the kids because they wanted to buy expensive things. 

I have my children look through the Sunday paper and cut out coupons for the items that we use in our household. My children will then receive the value of that coupon to use in any way they want during our family vacation.

I have two daughters whom I have always tried to teach to be frugal. In the grocery store you can usually hear them ask if something is on sale and "do you have a coupon?"

At some point it occurred to me that after age 10 or 12, my children were saving up money and their interests changed and they wanted to spend their money. I was not against this, but the items that they wanted to buy were things like video games, etc. with a higher price tag than what we were used to up to that point.