Naturally for a patriarchal society, there is a pocket money pay gap - 81% of boys get pocket money, amounting to £6.25 on average. While pocket money arguably no longer prepares children for the toils of proletarian labour in a capitalist economy (75p for cleaning all the windows in the house! And that were money in those days) it certainly still prepares you for the wider world, however. This is especially true now that pocket money has shifted from being something you’re expected to work for – just 22% of boys and 19% of girls are expected to do chores to earn their weekly payment – to being simply a gift for existing. Whether it’s Richie Rich down the corner shop flashing his fiver’s worth of Flying Saucers that he doesn’t share with anyone, or the kid with eight brothers and sisters who’s struggling along on 50p a week, it’s something that can make you acutely aware of disparities in family income (wearing “Nick’s” trainers instead of Nike’s is the other thing). When you’re a child, pocket money (or the lack of it) illuminates class differences. And, if the crowds of schoolkids outside Chicken Cottage are anything to go by, tons of preprandial junk food hastily gobbled on the way home. Though it does raise the question of to what the hell they are spending it on. But considering the national average is £6.20, the kids are still relatively all right, according to the Halifax survey. That would have been a lot of money to me back in the day – 15 penny sweets is nothing to be sneered at.

It seems that the Tories’ austerity measures have had a trickledown effect on the pocket money economy in England: the annual pocket money survey not only showed a drop in the percentage of eight- to 15-year-olds receiving pocket money – down to 78% from 84% in 2013 – but it also revealed that pocket money was down by 15p a week on average. The realisation that we don’t live in an egalitarian socialist utopia can be a harsh one to bear when you’re lying on the ground in Toys 'R Us as your undeveloped neurotransmitters are screaming that they want EVERYTHING. Why does Jenny get £5 a week when I only get £2? kids wonder.

For pocket money