Chore points: how one mom uses the MyCurrency app to get her kids to do chores
In these days of community quarantines and civic lock downs, people are scouring for ways to stay productive and entertained at home, and especially ways of doing that without spending money.
It’s in these circumstances that one MyCurrency user, a mother of two, is finding her own micro-currency useful for keeping her children — who are currently home from school due to the city being under a quarantine — busy, and motivating them to do their chores.
This mom created a currency and called it “chore points”. She also created a chore points store and added products to this store that her children had repeatedly been asking her to buy for them. She also added services, including hours for using the computer and the game console, and made them purchasable with the chore points.
So how do her children use the points? She had them install the free MyCurrency app (they each have their own phone), and each chore they do has a corresponding number of chore points that she sends to them at the end of the day. With this reward system, the only way her eldest would get a new phone is to earn 10,000 chore points. Her son really wants the new phone, so mom reports that she doesn’t even need to beg or force him to do his chores anymore.
Attaching a cost to using computers and game consoles also lessens their time with their gadgets. Every time they want to play on their computer, they need to buy hours from their mom using their chore points, and often they’d rather go outside and play basketball and save those 20 points.
Beyond chores, her kids also receive points when they read their books and finish their homework. They even get a point for every time they wash their hands. A win win for everyone!
The chore points reward system also taught her kids the value of working for what they want even when their parents have the means of buying it for them.
And it makes it fun. The children enjoy watching their points increase and accumulate. They also find the experience of buying products online, in the chore points store on MyCurrency, fun, even jokingly saying that they are just like their mommy doing online shopping when they add a product to their cart to make a purchase with their chore points.
