Jordan Bench

Every so often, maybe weekly or bi-weekly when we're doing chores around the house or working, I either need to go to the gas station for something down the street or go wash my car. Bo typically joins me and we go to the gas station and often I would let him pick out whatever he wanted. He would always pick out the $8 bag of candy or whatever and I started thinking about it and I thought:

One, we don't need to spend so much money every time on a big bag of candy.
Two, he doesn't need the candy. I can get him a 69-cent Laffy Taffy and he'd be just fine.
Three, I ought to be teaching him about money, how to earn it, what it's worth, and how to spend it.

One day, we drive down to the gas station, and excitement's usually pretty high. With Bo in the back seat, I stall to fill up the truck with gas, we hop out, and Bo can barely wait to run in the gas station. He's just so excited, telling me I'm the best dad ever and how today is the best day ever, which is fun to watch.

We go in there and head right to the candy aisle. In the candy aisle, there's a kind of a light-up lightsaber Star Wars toy, and Bo gets fixated on this. It was about a $9 toy, $8.47, and he really wanted that lightsaber. To me, this was my opportunity to teach him the value of money.

So I told him, "I'm not gonna buy that for you. Dad also has to earn money for all of the things that we buy and I work hard to earn my own money. This time it's your turn to earn your own money to buy this if you want it." So I began to explain to him how that works and told him that I'd have some jobs for him that he could work on at the house with me and I could pay him for his time.

As we cleaned the basement out and prepared for us to finish the basement, I had a good amount of projects and things that needed to be taken down and moved to the garage. Over a couple weeks I had Bo help me with those projects and, along with some other ways of earning more quarters every time he was able to poop—that's a whole other story because that's a digestion issue we've been dealing with, we're incentivizing him to go to the bathroom.

So anyways I gave him some jobs and he gets really excited about doing jobs together. I think he has, aside from the earning potential, a lot of fun working with me. Building stuff and doing projects is one of the few true joys of building something with your kids or your son and it's something that they always remember. They never forget the things that you built with them.

After a long Saturday of work, I pulled down the coin jar that's full of tons and tons of coins and tons of one dollar bills. For whatever reason that's where we've tossed our one dollar bills and that's become the jar we use to pay our kids when they earn a few dollars.

I pulled out three dollars and gave them to Bo. He'd been saving up and had been pooling together all of his one dollar bills that he'd been given over the last six to twelve months, along with all of his coins. He put them in a plastic bag.

"Dad, I have $10 ready to go to the gas station."

Mind you this was a Sunday morning. He told me this and I said, "Bo, well today is Sunday so we're not going to go to the gas station today but I'll take you tomorrow." Monday was Martin Luther King Day 2026 so I had work off and I was able to take Bo down.

And to see the excitement he had of earning and saving his own money and being able to count it up and know how many dollars he had and how much the lightsaber would cost him and then to ask if we could take him down to the gas station—it was priceless to see.

So Monday was here and Abbey and the kids came back from teaching barre at the gym. Me and Bo, we hopped in the truck and drove down to the gas station. Just like always, on the way there he said, "Dad, this is the best day ever." And he was excited. We pulled in the truck, parked to fill up gas. I unbuckled Bo and we ran into the gas station, went right to the candy aisle. Bo chose the blue lightsaber. Little did he know that the bottom of the lightsaber had candy. So he opened it up, a secret latch opened and there was a bag of candy in there. We took the lightsaber to the counter and the nice old man with white hair that always worked there and was always so nice took Bo's ziplock plastic bag of dollar bills and coins and helped him count it out. And helped him pay for the lightsaber. I sort of let Bo do everything at the counter, talk to the nice old man, and he got his lightsaber.

As I reflect on this small experience, while it was small it was meaningful to me; it was meaningful to Bo. It was a way for me to teach my son about the value of hard work and that's a theme that we have in our family: to work hard and dream big. You have to work; you have to provide value; you have to do something that someone else needs or wants done in order to earn money. I was able to teach him that through this experience.

I think it's good for kids to not always get what they want. I often am guilty of this.

So I'm grateful for this small experience I had to teach my son these things and to learn and grow together. That's been a goal of mine this year: to find ways to reinforce the principles and the maxims that we've chosen to live by. I'm excited to continue to look for experiences like this to teach and to lead.