All children are different. My six children may all look the same on the outside, but on the inside they all march to the beat of a different drum. I have naturally hard workers, and I have those we trained to work. I have a son who breathes music, and I have another son that needed his music lessons.

Likewise, I have a few who squirrel away every penny they get and a few whose pennies slip right between their fingers. Yet as a parent, you want to do your best to train your children to have positive character qualities—and saving money is one of them. Here are 5 tools for teaching your kids to save money.

1. Commission – not allowance.

We have never given our children an allowance. We teach them that everyone in the family does a part to make the family succeed; whether that is washing the dishes, mowing the lawn, or helping with the family business. I believe that when children are given everything they ask for they tend to grow up expecting life to give them everything they want. That is not reality. Once a child’s regular schoolwork and chores are done, we have a list of extra jobs he can choose from for a commission. That list would include things that go above and beyond what is normally expected.

Another way we’ve taught our children to earn is to foster an entrepreneurial spirit in them. From the time our oldest was little, my husband taught him to scrap metal. He would save pop cans, electric cords from discarded appliances, and old window frames and take them to the scrap yard at the end of the month. He did this until he reached his teenage years and secured a “real job.” Then the scrap business passed down to the next boy. Besides scrapping, our kids have sold crafts, mowed lawns, baked bread, decorated cakes, sold eggs, and done general handyman work to earn money.