Mr. Fuchs: Wait a minute. I haven’t stayed married this long by voicing my disagreement…and I’m not going to start here.

Instead, I’ll turn it over to William Wright, the president of Guidance Financial Consultants in Wichita, Kan., and the chairman of the Financial Planning Association of Kansas. He says that concepts like this are “rosy and look idealized and wonderful on paper,” but tend not to work with the vast majority of children.

Mrs. Fuchs: Why not? Because of the sock thing?

Mr. Fuchs: Well, he says (not me, I’m only quoting someone, Hon’), it’s not just that some of the kids will blow their money on “stereo equipment and piercing,” but he says that in any family he’s ever worked with, the only way to transfer financial ideals down is “through parental oversight.”

Mrs. Fuchs: I wasn’t going to let her loose—

Mr. Fuchs: Good, because Wright offered a scaled down and enhanced version of your plan. Maybe we can go with that and report back to readers on how it worked.

Mrs. Fuchs: What’s his plan?

Mr. Fuchs: He says that six months is way too bulky a time period. Goals will get lost in time. Instead, we should give a month’s worth of expense money. But on a weekly basis, we should sit down with our daughter, in order to monitor her expenses. This involves everything right down to getting receipts from her and watching her do the arithmetic to see how much money she has left that month. She spends. But we watch over it. “To get what you expect,” Wright says, “you must inspect.”

Mrs. Fuchs: Catchy. And seems to make sense.

Mr. Fuchs: Like Wright says, it's freedom, mixed with a lot of handholding. “Just look at the way you taught them to cross the street,” he says.

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