Wall Street Journal reporter John Jurgensen has written a fascinating piece called "Allowance 2.0," complete with podcast and sidebar interviews with celebrities. It's about the difficulties parents face in managing their children's allowances in the era of online shopping, iTunes, ringtones and World of Warcraft. And it's only getting worse: the new Playstation 3 and Wii both have iTunes-like stores where players can download new and classic games for a fee; the same is true for the year-old Xbox 360. So the parents in the article find themselves relying on allowance-tracking Web sites, creating Excel spreadsheets to follow the money, swapping chores for digital spending, and the like. Mother Barbara Howe tells Jurgensen of a recent credit card statement with charges of $7.99 for Tetris, $3.98 for Guy Stuff bikini girl wallpaper, $0.25 for an EBay bid alert and $32.67 in iTunes downloads--all racked up by her 14-year-old son Lucas. "It's killing me," Howe says, specifically referring to the increase in her son's iTunes downloading whenever a friend of his comes to visit.

The child-free staff here at The Revolution look at this entire phenomenon somewhat bemusedly. Our strict-but-loving Guyanese mother simply didn't believe in weekly allowances; instead, money was doled out only after a well-reasoned request, and still only as she saw fit. We simply can't imagine that she would have wasted any of her time negotiating with us, traded chores for digital dollars, or set up an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of our online spending. We'd have had to work for the money to pay for our digital distractions, or gone without. It's a philosophy that more parents should consider before they let their kids nickel-and-dime them all the way to the poorhouse.