<prompt> Human: My son is on the young end of this spectrum, but he has recently gotten deeply into LEGO and he wants to have all of the sets. I have no problems with him having the sets, but Im not going to buy them for him except for birthdays, Christmas, etc. He is 4.5 years old.Hes been saving his money to buy this super awesome LEGO castle, which is great. But he is getting discouraged right now because he has no real way to earn more money. So far his saved money has come from gifts from relatives or the occasional deal with me.Id like to set up an allowance for him, but I DO NOT want to just hand him free money. He is already in charge of feeding the dog, clearing the table after meals, carrying down laundry on laundry days, and picking up his toys at the end of the day. I dont want to pay him for doing those things, because I want him to feel like everybody in the family is expected to pitch in and help. But Id be okay with assigning additional optional chores in exchange for . I just dont know how much, how often, and for what to pay him for. What do you do? How do you teach your child to manage his money and save up for what he wants?  <response>: Most suggestions here are very nearly what I did with my daughter. I set up a list of chores and a dollar value for each. I also set the days on which those chores had to be done. She could do them early but they had to be done by the day on the schedule to get paid for it. And yes, we had mandatory chores. Failure to maintain those incurred a penalty to the money she had earned on the other chores. This accomplishes a couple of things ::1. It teaches your child that you must work for money. It isnt handed out freely for existing.2. It enforces a sense of schedules and deadlines. This helps with everything from homework assignments to managing time between work and home life. Learning to schedule is as arguably important as financial literacy.3. It can also teach your child to respect the things they have because they had to work so hard to earn them.You dont have to be as structured as this my daughter was 13 when we started this but it is something to consider as you decide which method will work best in your house. 