Reddit seems to be full of depressed 20-somethings who have never held a job. It’s full of lots of depressed people, many of whom are employed. But the former group always sticks out to me as the most desperate and demoralized.
How common is it for parents not to strongly encourage their high schoolers to get a job, whether it be a summer job or afterschool job (or both)?
Do you think getting and keeping a job in adolescence is a critical life experience in modern society? Because I do. I shudder to think what kind of person I would have turned into if I hadn’t been schooled in the art of menial labor every summer of high school. The lessons I learned from those horrible jobs were invaluable. I still find myself reflecting back on them all these years later.
Now, I guess I can see how a rich kid could be spared from adolescent employment without it being that detrimental to their ability to “launch”. But it seems to me that a typical working-class or middle-class kid needs to learn as soon as they can how to apply for a job, sit through an interview, and endure all the bullshit to get a paycheck at the end of the week. At the very least, getting a job demystifies the process of getting a job. So it’s no wonder to me why someone would feel intimidated by the “real world” if they haven’t gotten this kind of instruction earlier in life. It’s hard for me to feel like a parent who doesn’t push a kid in this direction is doing right by them.
Depends on the kids. Some turn out fine without the experience, some would be trouble even with it. On the whole, a good variety of crappy jobs is probably good life experience. So, short answer, I’d “strongly encourage” it for some kids, and not for others. I’d be more generally in favor it if for practically everyone (although I can conceive of some exceptions)
My oldest son wanted to work. He was into trucks and him and his Dad were rebuilding a 64 chevy. He wanted truck parts. My middle girl worked at a grocery chain, doing their weekly sale circular posters. She brought the supplies home and did them, and 1 summer of fast food work. ( that made her determined to get a degree).
The lil’wrekker, not so much. She thought she might babysit her brothers kids, never happened. I did it. Not daily. Just special nights out. I don’t know how she’s ever gonna be gainfully employed. My older 2 are gainfully employed as well as their spouses.
The lil’wrekker is speshul, forsure. She’s a full time college girl with a couple months of library aide work on her resume. I may have to feed her until I die. Alas.
heres the thing tho back in the 50s-80s when the whole teens getting jobs was in its golden age you didn’t have :
1 a lot of those jobs being competed for by displaced adults who lost theirs or adults looking for a 2nd or even 3rd side job
1a a lot of places not hiring anyone in high school due to the perception " they just screw around make things worse and cause me problems by a lot of places that used ot hire teenagers
2 a lot of the educational expectations parents have for kids have today Ie “id rather Johnny do his homework and study (which is 5 times that what it was when I went to hs in the 90s) and extra credit so he can go to college than a crappy low paying burger job
2a johnny has so many sports and extra activities (drama science ect club)at school that help with the above he dosent have time for a job
3 the” I grew up poor and worked like a dog but now im well off so my kids wont have to do so : idea
ive seen this ideal in action : I was at a newly opened gamestop and a kid and his mom came in and the kid started talking to one of the floor guys and mentioned he thought it would be cool to work there after school or in the summer the guy gave him the application and his mom took it and handed it back to the gs guy saying " I haven’t suffered through 6 years of crappy jobs and loans to go to school so I could start as the office cleaner until I worked my way up to a job I was qualified for so you’d have to get a job as a kid like I did apparently she ended up owning the place ……
There are a lot of parents, particularly parents who don’t have a college education, who believe that it’s more important for their kids to concentrate on their studies than to work part-time. My parents were like that (I took summer courses instead of getting a summer job), at least until I received a college acceptance letter. On the other hand, I knew a lot of kids who were smarter than me who also worked through high school.
Overall, I think the crappy jobs I had in college were good experience.
I think that it is probably at least a bit of a disservice to the kid.
My nephew is a college freshman; by all accounts, he’s doing very well in school – he made the honor roll in his first semester, and he seems to be finally coming out of his shell socially.
But…he’s never worked a day in his life, and, as far as I can tell, his parents never even brought up the topic. I do wonder about the culture shock he’s going to undergo when he does get that first job.
I’ll also note that my nephew shares a lot of his personality, and his smarts, with his father (my brother-in-law), who is, to be charitable, not a great employee. My brother-in-law is a very smart guy, but he is also pretty pompous about his smarts, and has real issues with hiding his clear disgust for managers and colleagues whom he thinks are beneath him. As a result, his career (he’s a senior IT guy) has consisted of bouncing from job to job, once he wears out his welcome. So, I can foresee some real issues for my nephew the first time he has to deal with doing crap work, or with an idiot for a boss.
I never worked a day in my life until I got my first job after college. No culture shock here. Pretty normal, all in all.
Well, that’s a separate issue. It’s something better to get “out of the way” with a consequenceless first job in school. Except if you BIL still has those issues, is there much reason to think those behavior issues will ever go away?
It’s an excellent question. When the nephew was younger (up until age 14 or 15), he had serious anger / emotion management issues. He’d get frustrated or disappointed over small things, and suffer a complete meltdown. I know that he went to a counselor for a while (something his father could probably really use, too), and nephew seems to be more in control these days.
On the other hand, on his second day of college, his roommate accidentally locked him out of their room while nephew was in the shower, making the nephew late for a freshman convocation, and causing a panic attack which lasted for days. So…I dunno.
The anecdote’s becoming increasingly removed from the OP, so I’ll stop the sidetrack now.
Eh, I didn’t have a “real” job (i.e., not babysitting, volunteer work, or one-day temp agency assignments) until after my sophomore year of college. I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. (I did apply for jobs before that, but had a hard time getting them; the problem was that I was twenty before I a) looked old enough to have a job; and b) had acquired enough social eptitude to get through an interview without the prospective employer immediately going “HELL NO.” At any rate, I seem to have caught up and become a perfectly employable adult.)
It does depend on the kid, and on the circumstances. My son didn’t really have the option of working any time during high school, as an expat kid. He went to summer enrichment programs like CTY instead. Given a choice I would have preferred that he work during the summer because it can be character-building, but it didn’t seem to matter much in his case: the first time he had an opportunity to work (as an ESL teaching assistant at the summer programs offered by a private school here in Hawaii), he was over the moon, even though he had to drive an hour each way to get to work and the job started at 7:30am each day. I have a photo of him grinning like a madman with his very first paycheck!
I’d love to pat myself on the back for good parenting, but nah…that was just his inborn temperament. Still, as a general parenting guideline, I would want my kid to work during the summer in high school. During the school year would depend on what the kid could handle - it might be too much with a tough courseload and an easily stressed student, or it might be a great experience.
Like others responding here, I’m of two minds about this. One thing I’ve learned is that my experience growing up is not my kid’s experience, and I can’t force it on them. Too often I find myself learning that much is just different now.
I’ll use the example of getting a driver’s license (not to derail the original discussion, just an example of something being different). When I was growing up it was normal for a teenager to get their driver’s license and soon as they could, on their 16th birthday, because you JUST COULD NOT WAIT to drive. Now, it seems, not so much.
Similarly, having a job and having your own money was very desirable when and where I was growing up. Now, it seems, not so much. Add into this the idea of independence and getting your own place.
I do find with my one kid, they and their friends seem to be on a little different timeline about these life milestones. They are getting there, just later than when I was growing up. It seems that the drive to be a grownup isn’t the same today. Maybe it’s all those memes about “adulting” being so hard that scares them off, I dunno.
My daughter is 17 and will just be starting her first job in about a month. At times my husband and I strongly suggested she work, but we never pushed it. She’s done some volunteering, in fact she’s doing that as I type this. I think it will be a good experience for her, I worked when I was 14. That said, school comes first, and I remember having a lot of work to do in high school, but based on her experience since middle school, I think it’s gone over the top with the amount of work and, what seems to me, like more detailed knowledge students are required to have these days.
it’s not as easy to get a job as a teen as it was when I was a teen. I babysat with absolutely no child experience at the age of 12. For multiple families. I’m a parent now, and there is absolutely no way that I would hire 12 year old me to watch my kids. Most of the jobs I had (late 80s and early 90s) there is no chance for a teen to get now.
True. Also jobs that used to be for kids have been taken over by adults. Paper routes, bagboy at the grocery store, fast food, etc. are full of adults now.
My son was doing volunteer work, odd jobs, pet sitting, mowing lawns, etc. in high school I never pushed him to get a “real job”. Why should he? He was doing enough with going to school and earning his spending money in a way that let him enjoy being a teenager.
After high school, he was expected to get at least a part time job during the summers and while he was in college. At 20, he’s working full time at a hotel (front desk/night audit) and going to city college part time. I say he’s doing pretty well.
Life is for the living, you’ll never get those years back. I wish like hell I didn’t work in college, I didn’t need the money.
As long as a high school or college student is doing something constructive, it beats working crap jobs.
Get involved and do things. Don’t waste your valuable younger years working menial jobs.
The best part of my kids working is that they realised that crappy jobs are crappy and all four are now at Uni studying for proper careers (nursing, economics and engineering).
I started working a local market selling secondhand clothes in the late 1970’s, taught me a lot and I still remember some of the skills!
My kids were always looking for ways to earn money. Raking leaves, shoveling snow, walking dogs. I didn’t have to push them. They wanted stuff like Game Boys and Magic: The Gathering cards and certain clothes I woudn’t buy them (black leather trench coat a la The Matrix).
They also could get a certain amount of their allowance docked if they didn’t do their chores.
One son had a job he liked better than school and it was actually kind of a struggle to convince him he needed to get a HS diploma.
I had a couple of jobs in high school and college, but just in the summers, not simultaneous with schoolwork (other than babysitting).
I wish I had been forced to APPLY for competitive jobs earlier in my life (say, in high school). THAT’s the experience I’d missed out on. Until disturbingly late in my life, jobs either just fell into my lap (stepfather’s colleague is looking for someone to XYZ…), or evolved from volunteer activities. I never learned how to handle the disappointment of rejection, get up, and keep trying; and, I had little sense of testing out the value of my skills in the open market, to then adjust those skills and expectations accordingly.
So, I’ll make sure my child DOES have more experience with these things.
