Are parents who don't push their teenagers to get jobs doing bad by them?

In My Humble Opinion
61

I would hope I am not the ONLY parent whose experience was that the teaching of SOME lessons was improved by input from third parties - whether teachers, coaches, or - yes - employers. To all of you perfect parents who were fully able to educate your kid on all topics and provide all manner of experience - congrats! You were better at it than I.

And sure, teens can find all manner of ways to occupy their time - especially if their parents pay for those activities. I, however, think that by the time a kid is in their mid-teens, it is high time for them to start learning the lesson that they are going to eventually have to be responsible for their personal support and contribute to whatever household the inhabit.

No, I’m not a big fan of what I perceive as today’s trend of grossly extended childhoods. Folk can (and clearly do) differ.

62

Sure, a parent could encourage all of these things. Parents could even schedule these activities, pay for them, and chaperone their teens to them all summer long.

And this bears no resemblance to how life will be once the teenager is a taxpaying adult. Having a job provides a kid with practical, real world perspective that going to basketball camp doesn’t.

63

Add “real world perspective” to the list of weak justifications.

64

That’s what I was thinking too… sometimes, no matter how logical, gentle and reasonable you present a concept or a suggestion, your children will disregard it because it’s coming from YOU.

But some third-party authority figure or trusted person can often say the exact same thing and have it stick merely because they’re not the parent.

65

Just curious, Ruken - how many kids do you have, and what are their ages? And, how would you characterize your socioeconomic class? Just generally - middle class, upper middle, wealthy, working class - any terms that make sense to you.

66

The kind of 20s somethings that inspired the OP don’t strike me as having been teens who spent their summers in basketball camp and advanced math claases. They strike me as the kind of kids who weren’t really plugged into anything except perhaps gaming and Reddit.

I think if I had a kid who already seemed pretty disciplined and goal-oriented, I would not worry about putting them to work (unless they were constantly bugging me for spending money.) But if my hypothetical teen was a slacker perfectly content doing the bare minimum, I just can’t see how a job of some type wouldn’t be in order, barring some extenuating circumstances.

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67

There’s pushing and there’s pushing…

This made my teens very unpleasant; my mother was very firmly in the ‘get a job’ camp, to the point of getting angry at me for not having one. Unfortunately, we lived in a small village, 10 miles from the nearest large town, which barely had public transport (two buses a day some days, hardly useful for getting to shift) and even after I got my driving license, I couldn’t afford a car without a job. All the things like paper rounds were taken up by retired people who were basically doing them to stay active, and we’d only recently moved there, I didn’t go to school there and barely knew anyone, so I had no contacts.

Oh, and it was the middle of a local job depression, where a livestock disease outbreak had closed many of the small farms that had previously formed the basis of the local economy, capped off by the two largest factories in town shutting down the same year.

My mother has never once applied for a job and not got it. She grew up on the edge of a city in a time of worker shortages. A place an time where she finished compulsory schooling on Friday, phoned and applied for her first proper job on Saturday and started there on Monday. She just could not understand why I wasn’t getting a job, and figured it was because she wasn’t pushing me hard enough…

I’d say getting experience of real life work environments and budgeting is probably useful to most kids, but it’s not worth going crazy over.

68

Yeah, I’d imagine it would be tougher for folk living in rural areas - tho, by dfinition, the majority of teens don’t live in such places. IME, a great many of the kids I know who live in rural places have access to a car, or someone drives them. Would stink if you didn’t have that. Of course, there is always the trusty bicycle… Even tho I lived in Chicago, for 2 summers I regularly rode my bike 10 miles each way to/from work.

Did you ever ask your mom’s assistance in identifying prospective employers, and brainstorming how you would get back and forth? Sounds like she might have been a tad removed from reality.

69

How on earth is that a weak justification?

70

Because it’s meaningless. I got a job when I was 16. I valued it for a variety of reasons, but “real world perspective”, whatever that means, doesn’t even come into consideration.

71

It may be meaningless to you but not to others, believe it or not.

72

How many times have you had to explain to friends that “I feel useless” is not a reason to quite a job? That their employer is not paying them to “feel” anything about their job?

I’ve had friends and acquaintances that lacked a real-world perspective on work.

73

They by all means tell us what you think it means

74

Zero. But see? There you used words (ones their parents apparently didn’t use) to teach them something that their “real world experience” clearly had not.

75

When I was in high school (1991-1995), it was a marker of coolness to have a job. Unless you were real unpopular or your job was something weird or secretive, it was a thing for everyone to know where you worked. We all knew Chanté ran the register at the Publix at the strip mall up the street, Gabby worked at the Baskin Robbins a few blocks down, Lydia worked at Subway next door, and Rose worked at the local library. We’d keep track of this trivia because it was cool being able to see your classmates being “grown” (plus, they might give you a hook-up!) I would always feel a sense of pride with myself whenever a classmate saw me in action on the job. I felt like a “somebody”.

I agree with you about the social stuff. At school, most of my associates were high-achieving middle-class kids headed to college. And of course they were my close to my age. But on the job, my coworkers spanned a wide range of ages. Many were poor and working-class. Some were students at rival high schools (schools meanly labeled as “ghetto”), some were in college, and some were just “adulting” the best way they could. Being with all those disparate people and getting along with them despite our differences was a cool experience. Some of my fondest memories of my teenage years are all the fun and crazy things we did to cope with the drudgery. Even when it sucked, it was still kind of a fun.

76

A work ethic was mandated in my family by my maternal grandparents - there was little time for slacking, it was your job to be productive in one way or another, and (as mentioned in another thread), if another Great Depression came along, the only thing which kept you from starvation was your job. This was the central message of my childhood, repeated daily every summer: Work or starve.

I can honestly testify that my “work” life began at the age of four, working with my grandparents on their rental homes in Daytona Beach, FL, during our yearly 4-6-week vacation with my mothers parents (my mother passed away when I was 1, so her parents got the 4 grandkids during the summer, in groups of 2. This went until the age of 14 when I got a summer job by forging my work certificate. See below.)

What can a 4yo do? Well: Pull weeds, squish bugs, shake small carpets, hold the dust pan, spray and wipe (Windex/Lysol/Pledge), more, on a daily basis from Mon-Friday. We did that for a year or two, then they bought the campground/mobile home park, and that’s when the work really started. Sod laying, fence building, clearing out the sewage treatment plant, installing mobile homes (from the ages of 7-14 I was used to squeeze under these things and install the electric, cable TV, and… when I was big and strong enough… the sewage and water connections). This was every day, from 8am-3, 4pm, M-F, and we got paid a quarter an hour (which went into savings, which we got when we were 18).

When I was 14, a northeaster blew in and destroyed the seawall, necessitating a rebuild. My uncle was a civil engineer (and part-owner of the park) so he designed a seawall (did a fantastic job too) and lined up the contractors to pour concrete, etc. The design necessitated the building of wooden frames to hold galvanized rods (used to anchor the concrete), and someone needed to be in the “pit” - one was dug every 50 feet for over 1,500 feet of shoreline to make sure the rods didn’t shift as the concrete was being poured. My job was to:

  1. Build the frames
  2. Be in the pit, during summer when the temperature was easily 110 degrees down in those holes.

We got the fucker built, it’s still standing (top-right picture - click on it for a bigger view), though the sand is much higher on the water breaks than it was in 1981.

The next summer I got a job at an ice cream parlor and, though I was 14, it was the easiest summer job I’ve had in 10 years. We had to get a permit through our school to allow us to work if we were 15, and not allowed to work at the age of 14, but I forged my birthdate and handed the certificate to the Vice Principal when he had 4 other people asking him for shit, so he just signed it w/o looking at it. I was finally free!

And through this, all four of us (my siblings and myself) also developed an appreciation for work, saving, etc. And I’ve done the same for my daughter, but with revisions. When she was 9yo, we went on a trip to Jersey to visit my wife’s family, and we took some time to go to Princeton while there. And while there, I told Sophia that “everyone in our family has their job to do - mine is to earn money, mom’s was to organize the family, and your job, Sophia, is to get an education. And I want you to aim for Princeton, possibly the smartest university on the planet, even though it’s very likely you won’t get in - but you’ll get into UCLA*, or SMU, or Duke. But, point is, your job is to work on your education and we expect you to take it seriously, and will work with you so that this happens.”

And she has! Straight-A student, leads an active student club dedicated to assisting animals, gets nervous if she doesn’t study, has earned money multiple ways (jobs, door-to-door sales, spontaneous bake sales) - we’ve worked with her on developing the habits and the ethic to get this done.

So I firmly believe in the value of installing a work ethic, and ensuring that children are meeting productive standards one way or another. My grandparents way was a product of who they were and their experiences (raising two babies in the Depression was easily the defining experience of their marriage), and I’ve taken the same attitude but broadened it to more than “make money & save” (though Sophia is great at that, too.)

*Sophia has always loved Los Angeles.

77

It means seeing the intrinsic value to earning your own spending money and no longer having to ask others for cash. This is something that you either get or you don’t.

It means learning that a job doesn’t define you like your K-12 education might lead you to believe. As a teen, I worked minimum wage jobs alongside adults, and I got to know them as real people. Not as faceless job titles. Their jobs were simply a means for them to get money so they could survive or whatever, and they were okay with that; it wasn’t a major deal for them. And that is a reassuring thing to see if you’ve been taught to associate self worth with how prestigious your job is. If you’re a middle-class kid who goes to school with other middle-class kids, you’re probably not going to have many opportunities to interact with folks outside your socioeconomic class unless you have a job.

It means seeing how crazy and inappropriate and compassionate people can be as customers. Nothing can replicate the experience that comes with working in the service industry; it shapes your understanding of the human condition. In retail, you learn about the extremes people will go to shoplift the most random things. If you work in a restaurant, you can see how ugly type A personalities can be when their orders are screwed up. You see racism, sexism, ageism, lookism, etc, and how that affects people in the workplace.

That is just a few ways “practical, real world perspective” is obtained by working a job as a teenager.

78

This is totally true, but I also think a kid can get much needed self-worth from their job. Schools can be so hyper-competitive nowadays. If you’re not cut out for varsity team, you’re always stuck playing trees in the school plays, you’re never selected for any awards or recognitions, and despite all your hard work and parental pushing, you’re just a solid C student, school may take away more from your self-esteem than contribute to it. But at least you can be employee of the month.

I remember how bowled over sixteen-year-old me was when my manager at Six Flags told me I was being considered for management. Me be the boss? Even though I wasn’t interested in that responsibility, it felt good to know that I had been noticed in a positive way. I suspect some of the teen-aged managers that I worked under weren’t necessarily the smartest, most-likely-to-succeed kids at their respective schools. But they did have some status at work, and that was something.

79

Uh huh. When you earn money you get more money. I didn’t need a job to understand this.

Or just teach your kids otherwise

Perhaps El Paso’s school boundaries contain more diverse economic situations than elsewhere, but even if they didn’t…volunteering, church, orchestra, sports, going to Mexico (not really fair because for us that was just walking across a bridge), using the public library, just plain talking to strangers…
I guess people near where I am now in some gated NoVa burb situation might be more insulated (despite probably loudly demanding diversity everywhere else.) Exposure, in general, is good. It does not require a job in high school.

Or just exist with your eyes and ears open. We’ve all seen those ugly fits in restaurants. I don’t see myself missing out by not having been on the receiving end of those in particular (I’ve certainly been on the receiving end of other types.)

So we’ve confirmed these parents are not “doing bad by them”.

80

But a lot of people do.

Experience is a superior teacher.

Your school experience is not representative of everyone’s.

Talking to strangers (WTF?) doesn’t compare to working on a team with someone who might otherwise be invisible to you.

Actually, no “we” haven’t. And simply seeing a scene is different from bearing the brunt of customer dissatisfaction and successfully managing that stress.

You seem to have forgotten that you asked me to explain how having a job gives kids a real world perspective. It’s a mystery why you seem to be looking for me to prove it’s impossible to get that perspective from other sources. I don’t think it’s impossible; I just think a job is the most efficient way to get it. Plus it produces income instead of consumes it, unlike pretty much all the other alternatives you rattled off earlier.

Dude, they were just examples.