Mum who makes kids ‘pay’ for food and internet says it’s a great lesson on budgeting

Allowing her children to understand the value of money, a mum has admitted that she ‘charges’ her children – aged 9, 10, 11, and 12 – for bills, including Netflix, food, and water

While it’s always a good idea to teach your children the value of money, especially during a cost of living crisis, one mum has taken things one step further. Ashleigh Jade Le ‘charges’ her children, aged nine, ten 11, and 12 for household bills – including the Netflix subscription, food shop, and even the water bill.

The mum insists that if her children don’t make their payment, she will simply not give them access. While this may be surprising, Ashleigh assures that her method helps her kids understand the value of money.

The mum – boasts more than 6,500 followers on TikTok account @dysfunctionalmummy – shared a clip to the popular video-streaming service explaining her money method, which has surpassed 410,000 views to date.

Ashleigh gives her children paper notes to help them budget and put towards household bills.

The mum explained: “Once they’ve got their money, once it’s all been dished out and they’ve got their wages, they walk away and they all have a list of what bills they can pay.

“If they don’t pay it, they don’t get access to it.

“If they don’t pay their internet bill, I change the Wi-Fi password so they don’t have Wi-Fi.

“Some have phones – they have attempted to tether from their phone and make it through the month but that did not work, so that’s quite fun.

“They pay for Netflix, Disney, Prime, and they pay the price that they would pay if they were 18 and out in the big world and paying this.”

She went on: “Their bills are due on varying dates depending on which bill needs to be paid first.

“I let them pay for their bills usually the week of, but not necessarily right up until the whole beginning of the month, and that’s actually the price they pay for each bill.

“So a standard EE contract is 30, Netflix 15, Disney, 10 and so on.

“Some children don’t watch Anime, so they don’t pay for Crunchy Roll. Some children don’t pay for phone bill as they don’t have a phone, so they don’t pay for that.

“I go down the list, each child has a different colour, that colour represents everything they own – their water bottles, their rooms, their bags, their coats.

The mum explained that getting her children to ‘pay’ has been the ‘most funny experience’.

She explained: “The day that I told them I was doing this, they had the funniest opinions about paying bills – and some of them were so in shock.

“When I told them they had to pay for food, some of them looked like they were going to cry and when I explained that it was fake money and they didn’t have to do anything, I was just going to give them the money and they were just going to hand it back to me, they were still so upset that they were losing money.

“Since that day, things have changed massively. They are so much more thoughtful about where they put their things, they treat things so much better.”

Flocking to the comment section, people were keen to praise the mum’s ‘great’ ideas as several people were keen to give the method a go themselves.

One person wrote: “This will definitely help them in the real world such a great idea.”

“Don’t know about kids I’m doing this with my husband, great idea,” a second joked.

A third added: “This is an amazing idea, definitely keeping it in mind for when my son is older xo.”

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