I love watching the wife and kids play store. It amazes me that they value it so much. My wife keeps a checkbook for each child and as they do chores or other things that earn them “money” they can use it to buy things from “the store.” This is a cache of trinkets and items that my wonderful wife has bought or collected for the kids. Sometimes she puts specific things in there for a certain child knowing he or she will end up with it. To watch from a far, the wife picks a task to do while the kids take a half an hour or so to finger through the goodies. They diligently add and subtract making painful decisions between this and that. It could be “do I want the hair pin or the pencil?” “If I buy the matchbox car I won’t have enough left to buy the pad of paper.” Every couple of minutes one of the children looks up and says “how much is this?” and the wife without batting and eye or getting distracted throws out a figure so matter of factly you’d think she had been part of the manufacturing process. What’s more, she remembers every price she says so when the child challenges “how much was this again?” the same price immediate spits out! Logically I wouldn’t think the incentives outweight the efforts for the kids because many of the treasures are things they could have simply by asking or receive regularly anyway. I love the kids! I love my wife!
