Good morning {{first_name|Reader}},

No Observation, no Watch, no Number this week. Just something that happened recently that I have been thinking about since it did.

My 10-year-old son Scott has been coming with me on Spark delivery shifts. He earns 25% of what I make. He works for every dollar of it.

Here is what that looks like, and why I think the question underneath it matters to every parent thinking about what they are building in their kids before the world starts building something else.

My son Scott is ten years old and he has a checking account.

We do not pay our kids an allowance for household chores. Cleaning your room, helping with dishes, picking up after yourself, that is the price of living in our house. You do not get paid for being a member of the family. We want our kids to feel the difference between contributing to something because you belong to it and earning money because you showed up and did the work.

Every parent eventually has to decide what they want their kids to understand about the relationship between work and money before the world builds its own curriculum. That decision looks different in every household. We made ours.

Earning money is a different conversation. And earlier this year I found a way to have that conversation with Scott in a way no kitchen table talk could replicate.

Spark Delivery is Walmart's grocery delivery service (1099 contractor). As a Spark driver, you either walk the store and shop a customer's order yourself and deliver it, or pick up a completed curbside order and deliver it. When you shop the order, the Spark app guides you through the store item by item, showing you exactly where each product is located on the shelf. There is also a locate button, you tap it and a small green light flashes near the item on the shelf display. It is a small feature. It turns out to be a significant one when your ten-year-old is running point.

I push the cart and Scott runs the floor. The moment I tap locate, he is already moving toward the green light while I am still maneuvering the cart around the end of the aisle. By the time I get there, he has the item in his hands. We cover the store faster together than I do alone, which matters on a shift that pays by the order.

Scott earns 25% of what I make on every shift. We started at 50%, and the honest answer is that taking that cut as the adult doing the driving, the navigation, the customer interaction, and the account management was significant for something I am already doing. We settled at 25% and it is fair. He knows it is fair. He also knows exactly why it is 25% and not more, which is its own lesson.

The money goes directly into his checking account. His to keep, his to manage, his to decide what to do with. We talk about it but we do not dictate it.

I do not do Spark Delivery because we need the money. Our financial goals are on track. The savings rate is where it needs to be. We have enough in investments that outside of our Roth IRAs, we are not relying on additional contributions to stay on pace. This is what I have started calling a paid hobby, something that generates income while also serving a purpose that has nothing to do with income. In this case, that purpose is teaching my son what hustle actually looks like before the world teaches him a worse version of it. (besides, sitting on the couch watching TV rots your brain, at least that’s what I was always told…)

Telling a kid that money comes from work is easy. Putting them in a Walmart in Wasilla, Alaska at ten years old, giving them a real function, and watching them figure out the difference between a productive shift and a wasted one, that stays with them in a different way. He knows our goal hourly rate when we see offers coming through and makes recommendations on which ones to take. (so far, we are at around $30 per hour)

Scott knows the difference now. You can see it in how he moves when the locate button lights up. He asks to go all the time. He brings it up before I do.

You might run a completely different system with your kids. (reply and tell me about it) Maybe an allowance works for your family. Maybe you have found something better than what we are doing. What I know is that every parent is trying to create the moment when a kid counts their own money and asks when they can earn more. Whatever gets your kid to that moment is worth doing.

We have three kids. Scott is the middle child. What he learns about earning and showing up, the feeling of money he worked for sitting in an account with his name on it, his siblings will absorb a version of it from watching him. Families teach this way. The kids are paying attention to each other long before they are paying attention to us.

There is a version of this essay where I make a larger argument about allowances, about the generation of kids who never learned to work because someone always made it comfortable for them not to. That is not this essay. Every family makes its own choices and I am not here to tell anyone what theirs should be.

What I can tell you is what I am after with Scott. The money in his checking account is there because he moved fast when the light went green. That is the habit I am building. The response to the light.

The money is just proof that it worked.

Scott got into the car after our last shift, counted up what he had earned, and asked when we were going next.

That is what I was after. Not the delivery. Not the money. That question.

If you have kids, you already know the version of that question you are trying to create in your own home. The specifics do not matter much. The habit underneath them does.