Ideas for 5 yo to earn a toy

[mommyatty]

DD wants an American Girl doll. A smaller one that is about $60. I would like to let her "earn" it, but I don't have any ideas of things she can do. I don't really want it to be about earning money, but more about achieving something. I don't know... maybe it would be a better lesson if she earned the money. Ideas? Thoughts?

[k3am]

Anything that you're working on behavior wise? DD most recently earned a big item by having good manners, which she'd been seriously lacking. An unprompted please and thank you earned her a sticker. 30 stickers earned her prize.

[supertrooper1]

We've been doing marbles for good behavior with DS. I have a jelly size mason jar that we add a marble to when he has good behavior. Lately, we've been struggling with getting dressed by himself, so he gets one for that. So far he's earned one prize, a lunch box of his choice. The prize he's working on now is a Paw Patrol blanket. We've stayed around $20.

[traveltheworld]

Ideas that we came up with for DS (also 5) to earn extra money include: helping with washing the car, doing laundry (basically involves moving the clothes from hamper to washer, and from washer to dryer), vacuuming (he is surprisingly good at this), snow removal for neighbours (DH refuses to pay him to shovel our own snow), teaching DD how to swim (basically just encouraging DD to kick and generally playing with her at the expense of swimming and enjoying himself), picking up garbage from the nearby park (you'd never see a kid as excited about seeing garbage as my son. Also, the nearby park is very clean, so we are not talking about gross garbage, more like a random napkin or juice box here or there).

We match whatever he saves towards whatever it is that he wants to buy. We also frequently lie about the price of stuff. Like when he wanted a $140 Bruder truck (we told him it was $60, so his portion was only $30), or when he wanted to buy our nanny a really nice notebook for her birthday (we told him that it was $5). This only works for the bigger items where I tell him I'm ordering it through Amazon, or have found it on sale. For the smaller stuff that he can see and wants in store, since he can read the price tag, that trick doesn't work.

[traveltheworld]

Oh for what it's worth - DH is all about instilling the concept of delayed gratification. So he is firmly of the view that it should take DS a long time to save and earn something big....to the point where DS frequently has forgotten what he was originally saving for. DH is also firmly of the view that DS should not be rewarded for good behaviour - i.e. that good behaviour is expected and we praise good behaviour, but do not attach tangible rewards to such behaviour. I think rewards for good behaviour are fine as it builds a habit of good behaviour, and habit-forming is important for young children. But this is one of the very few areas in our lives that DH is dead set on, so I leave it.