The Hindu Business Line : How much is too much?

When 16-year-old Rajesh asked his businessman father to buy him a new motorbike, he was a given a car. So, before he was old enough to get a driving licence, Rajesh was driving a car and paying for the petrol with a petro-card loaded by his father.

In addition to all this, Rajesh gets money for whatever he requires from both his parents. Mercifully, teenagers like Rajesh are still a minority.

Here's another extreme — Nagesh, a 16-year-old, class XII student in a Chennai school, who has parents monitoring his every move. The family car drops and picks him up. The driver keeps tabs on him. And above all, he has no money on him. He has to appeal to his parents for any of his expenses.

Saroja Venkat, a Chennai-based interior decorator, offers an interesting perspective on the issue of teenagers and pocket money. A single parent, she has the sole responsibility of bringing up three sons. She says that kids, especially boys, have to be given the opportunity to handle money. The main reason for giving children pocket money is to help them learn to manage money when they are still young and their parents can guide them.

She has started bank accounts for her sons and on the first day of every month, their monthly allowance of Rs 1,500 is remitted to it. They have to learn to manage with this amount for the rest of the month. If they exhaust the amount before the month ends then it is their bad luck, says Saroja, with a grin. The three boys have ATM cards and are independent to a certain extent. There have been no major disasters so far, says the mother.

On the flip side, many parents say that with easy access to money there are higher probabilities of teenagers going astray. The tendency to smoke, drink and do drugs is higher when money is given with no strings attached. But Saroja says that money given to her son does have strings attached and the upbringing of the kids has a lot to do with how they use the money. A deep sense of what is right and wrong has to be inculcated from the time they are very small, she adds.

S. Chatterjee, a senior-level executive with an airline company, has given his daughter a debit card. Asha spends around Rs 500 per month and tells her parents what she has spent the money on. Her phone bills are taken care of by her father and the family car takes her wherever she wants to go.

Some others like Dr V Kurian, a Chennai-based surgeon, have given add-on credit cards that can be used for whatever his teenaged children want. This helps the parents keep track of where they are spending their money and also where they have been, without intruding on them.

He says that over the past one year, he's found that his daughter has mainly been to ice cream parlours, coffee pubs and lifestyle stores. This, of course, is no foolproof way of keeping tabs on one's offspring, he adds.

A dip stick survey of college students shows that on an average, teenagers in Chennai get an allowance of Rs 1,500 per month and this takes care of petrol, eating out and in some cases phone bills too. Most collegians opt for pre-paid cards worth Rs 800.

Most parents in Chennai, cutting across the socio-economic classification A, B and C, have a fair knowledge of how much and where their teenaged children spend their money.

How do teenagers in a metro like Chennai spend their money? Eating out accounts for a major portion of the allowance for both boys and girls, followed by movies, shopping, and in some cases, alcohol, and sometimes even drugs.

Then there are the parties, generally on the East Coast Road, funded largely by parents, says 18- year-old Sunitha, a first year student of Economics. On an average, these parties cost upwards of Rs 12,000 and this includes alcohol, music and short eats. The cost escalates in direct proportion to the depth of the parents' pockets.

Farmhouses with swimming pools are in great demand and the rental is around Rs 6,000. Some of these even offer a catering facility.

The drugs, of course, are not on the house and those who take drugs have to bring their own stuff, she adds.

Picture by A. Roy Chowdhury

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