It started on a Sunday. After lunch, we sat around talking. Looking at the dirty plates, glasses, and cooking pots, the conversation edged towards tidying up and how when we were kids, there wasn’t any option about who was going to do it. So far as we could see back from the future, that was one of the main reasons for having children. When they got big enough, they could bring the coal in.
In Woodbridge, Suffolk, a nice lady with two children reminisced not altogether fondly about how her ex-husband’s idea of childcare was watching The Simpsons, leaving her the housework, the cooking, the cleaning, looking after a large house and her more than full-time job. She talked about games she’d played as a child.
Within 30 seconds, we came up with the idea that a game could engage today’s children with household chores. After all, children used to engage with trying to stop a plastic donkey bucking gold mining equipment off its back. At 31 seconds, we decided that computer games and apps were part of the problem.
We found a lot of scientific evidence that backed our hunches: household chores don’t do themselves, which we knew; doing them together can produce a closer, more communicative family with a common purpose; and that a generation raised on smart phones wasn’t happily becoming the Utopian society of citizen-journalists we fondly hoped the Internet revolution would produce, but an army of anxious, image-obsessed young people with epidemic levels of mental illness, told how to behave not by concerned adults, but by algorithms designed to make internet media moguls richer every second with no subsidiary purpose.
So we came up with an old-school card game. 80 different chore cards. Ten blank cards so you can make your own to suit your own unique household. Ten Excuses cards that mean you don’t have to do a chore. But just like real life, no work means no reward. All made and produced in England, using Forestry Stewardship Council-approved fully-recyclable organic materials designed to engage four to fourteen-year-olds with the things that need doing around the house. Pocket Money Cards was born.
The science behind the game is unarguable. In 1938 Harvard University began the longest-running child development study ever conducted. Today, Dr Robert Waldinger is in charge of the programme that has scientifically established that taking part in household chores is one of the keys to becoming a happy, grounded adult.
Social psychologist and Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business, Jonathan Haidt, provides in The Anxious Generation what The Spectator describes as ‘robust scientific evidence for what we’ve all come to assume is true.’ Australia has banned access to Facebook, Instagram, X, Snapchat, and TikTok for under-16s. France is considering doing the same. New York is the most recent US state to ban mobile phones in schools, following a growing trend.
Pocket Money Cards can help get your home cleaner and tidier, but more important than that, it gets children off their phones and face-to-face, within reach, talking as part of a family, discussing common goals and how they can be achieved. Two years later, the cards are now in production, after making sure that they were safe for children, even if someone decided to eat them, and the first 2,000 packs were delivered to our offices at The Lecture Room at Parham Hall, deep in the idyllic Suffolk countryside.