Imagine if your kids made a spur-of-the-moment decision to offer to shovel the sidewalks of their neighbors. Must they impose a fee on everyone who lives nearby? I wouldn't have a problem with it (though I might make an exception for the elderly couple across the street).
Exactly how much money is owed. Of course, life isn't always black and white, and discussions about Snow Removal Maple Ridge, whether with kids or adults, may be fraught. If a child is hesitant to set a price for their services, the adult client may wind up paying too much or too little.
Having a clear understanding of the cost and scope of the project from the outset is highly recommended. For most snow removal occupations, a starting wage of $10 to $20 per hour seems reasonable. You may need to make other adjustments, though, based on your own expectations. When it snows, do you want the youngsters to also shovel your driveway and walkway? To what extent, exactly, along your property boundary do you want them to shovel?
In case the neighborhood kids volunteer to help out for free, you can always reward them with some cookies and hot cocoa once they're done. Times reporter Alina Tugend told me that one of her neighbors thanked her kid for shoveling by giving him a gift card to a sporting-goods store. Certainly not required, but appreciated all the same.
Those are the two most important takeaways. The goal here is to strike a balance between instilling in children the values of hard work and generosity. During one particularly snowy winter, my husband took our son Peter to help our neighbors across the street. Peter questioned the lack of payment at the time. The greater lesson of assisting others must have stayed with them, nevertheless. The other night, Peter saw our neighbors forced out onto the street by an electrical fire and went to encourage them to spend the night at our place. “I figured that's what you'd have wanted me to do,” he informed us.
A reporter from The New York Times called me up the other day to ask if I thought it was fair to pay kids to assist their neighbors remove snow. Perhaps shoveling snow is a neighborly act for which no payment is necessary. And if young people are compensated, how much do they typically earn?
As I mentioned before, the answer is conditional. Kids who have started their own lawn-mowing, snow-shoveling, plant-watering, newspaper-collecting businesses while their neighbors are away need to be compensated for their efforts. In contrast, if it's a matter of doing a nice deed, such as helping the elderly couple across the street clean up after a blizzard, then no payment is required.
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