You can learn about a fight from a book or a parental lecture as well. Doesn’t beat the experience of actually being in a few.
Intellectually knowing something and experiences can have vastly different levels of effectiveness.
Pretty much any of those examples you provided are a reasonable alternative to sitting around the house all summer playing videogames and watching Netflix.
My parents didn’t make me kill myself working, but it was strongly encouraged if I wanted extra spending money, I should go find a job. Since I was 15 or so, I worked all sorts of random jobs:
Retail jobs in the mall
Frozen dessert store
Fast food
Supermarket deli
Bus boy
As a child of the 80s, these were sort of “right of passage” jobs. Some were actually kind of fun, if you happen to work with some friends or they worked in the next store over.
When I came home from college break, I worked a lot of temp jobs that weren’t as fun. Mostly light industrial stuff in warehouses and factories or office jobs collating in the mail room.
My junior year, my summer jobs became more professional. One office temp job got extended into something almost like an “internship”, plus a couple of actual internships as an AutoCAD draftsman.
This may be a product of having worked in New York for most of my adult life, but I kind of feel like kids don’t really get the chance for those fun “coming of age” goof off jobs as a lifeguard or working at the local amusement park (like my wife did). Freshman year, they all seem to be jockeying for internships at tech startups, banks and consulting firms so they can land those coveted jobs when they graduate.
Nah. I didn’t have a ‘real’ job until the USN. I wasn’t the only one. It was a more extreme culture shock, but still manageable with minimal effort.
I’d say that parents whose kids do spend all the summer sitting around the house are failing them, whether those kids are playing videogames or preparing next year’s classes.
I wonder if there’s any kind of study comparing the success levels of kids who did/didn’t work as teens? That would answer the question pretty well.
Based on anecdotal evidence via our extended family(ies), I’m a strong supporter of kids working a reasonable amount as teens/young adults. There’s a strong correlation with teen work habits and adult success as I see it.
In our case, we simply kept kid’s fun budget at a low enough level they got jobs to supply themselves cooler stuff. Not subsistence level, but if they wanted something beyond basic clothing they needed to earn it. In most cases, we subsidized stuff if they were voluntarily paying for part of it.
Very well put. After my daughter’s first month as an IHOP waitress, she became very motivated to study and succeed. She was stunned at the girls roughly her age, who were trying to support a kid, and for whom a car breakdown was a disaster. She said: “Dad, I’m just there to get spending money for the mall – this is their life!”
There are but I didn’t bother linking any because as I mentioned up-thread, it’s near impossible to account for selection bias. With working you see worse academic performance, less college, more alcohol/tobacco/other drugs. But it’s not like anyone is randomly splitting kids into two groups. I haven’t seen any satisfactory accounting for confounding variables.
No one’s saying that’s not good. But if instead of a job at IHOP, she’d had the opportunity to work at a paying internship at a field she was interested in, would you have told her “No, I want you to work a crap job”? If she was really involved with a community organization, and she wanted to spend the summer re-doing their website and digitizing their files, would you have said “No, you need to do something more menial and less stimulating”? If she’d gotten a paid trip to study her passion at Stanford or MIT for 9 weeks, would that have been a waste, relatively?
I’m not saying it’s not a good thing to work. But it’s not the only good thing, and it’ not always worth the opportunity cost.
As far as life-altering, my kids who have to work, who pay family bills, would tell you that THAT experience is maturing and sobering like no other, and that the urgency and the determination that takes doesn’t begin to compare to the kid working for mall money. But no one seems to think they are doing their kid a disservice by denying them that essential experience of having what you do actually matter.
No one with any sense would say that. But a paid internship, just like a “ crap job”, can help a teen appreciate what they don’t want to do just as much as it can show them what they want. I think that was point of that IHOP anecdote.
To be honest, we can always come up with exceptions. A kid that has the talent and aspiration of being a professional athlete should probably spend their summers training and practicing their sport, not bagging groceries. A kid that is living in an economically depressed part of the country and doesn’t have transportation probably has better things to worry about than looking for work. A kid that isnt emotionally mature or resilient enough to handle job stress, bad bosses, or irate customers may be better off doing other things with their time. Most kids don’t fall into these groups, though.
I found this list of benefits to teens working and found nothing disagreeable about it all. The last one gets to heart of the OP. Building up a teenager’s confidence is important, and the more they can see themselves as capable at handling adult responsibilities, the more confident they will be.
Confidence and success go hand in hand. Some kids are naturally confident and don’t need a job or anything else to provide that. Many others derive confidence from proving themselves. A job is just like any other advanced milestone, like driving is, or riding public transportation routinely by yourself, or cooking a complex meal for your family. So perhaps the question shouldn’t be “Are parents who don’t push their teens to get jobs doing them a disservice?” Perhaps a better one is “Are parents who don’t push their teens towards self-reliance doing them a disservice?”
I am not sure about this. I think there’s people in this thread, and I’ve certainly met them in life, who really romanticize the McJob experience. And I have a pretty knee-jerk reaction to it, because I don’t like the idea that anything is just utterly essential, and I especially don’t like it when people want to argue that the way they happen to have done things is the only way.
I also think there’s a lot of people who don’t want kids to be ambitious. They find it unsettling. It’s not cool. I KNOW this vibe was a thing when I was a teen: there was a constant humming idea that it was better to play it safe, to set your sights low, to find a dependable, well-trodden path and stick to it. Every institution seemed really focused on making sure we didn’t get any inflated idea of our own importance. I spend a lot of my time pushing back against that narrative, trying to show kids that they can do things that matter, that they have something to offer.
I don’t disagree with any of that, but I just think it’s important to remember that a job is one way to do those things, not the only way. It really reminds me of people that joined the military and it was a really, really maturing experience for them, so now they think it’s the only way to grow up. It’s A way, and for many people, its’ a good way, but it’s not unique or essential.
And I would go past “self-reliance”. Parents need to do what they can to infuse their children with agency and ambition. Forcing a kid to get a job at the local yogurt shop, where they promptly do the bare minimum to not get fired and spend their money on dope and videogames is not really helping any of that. And when a kid is “pushed” to get a job, I think that’s about as likely to be the outcome as anything.
There seem to be no shortage of people who think “kids should be kids” and shouldn’t be pushed to do anything that’s risky or that they don’t want to do. They can no doubt point to examples of people being raised like this who turned out just fine and cite all the cautionary tales of what happens to “overly” pushed kids.
And maybe many of the kids who are raised like this do turn out just fine (however we want to define that). But it seems to me a lot of 20-somethings nowadays (especially middle class ones) routinely express the idea that no one taught them how to “adult”. I guess this could just be a new-fangled, social-media influenced way of not taking responsibility for youthful carelessness. (It occurs to me it could also be a subtle way of signaling ones class privilege, since you don’t hear a lot of people from poor/working-class backgrounds even using “adult” as a verb). But it does make me wonder if there are real downsides to making formal education a kid’s sole purpose in life. What happens to you psychologically if formal education is your sole purpose for 20-something years and then you can’t get the “good” job your parents promised would be yours if you just studied hard enough?
I’m actually not sure it would be necessarily better to have a 16-year-old kid interning in a stuffy office all summer versus working at a “crap job”. The teen-aged interns who come into my workpace during the summer are never given work that would give them any insight into what we actually do. They are typically stuffed into an isolated cubicle and generally ignored by everyone except for the person who put them there (who are usually doing someone else a favor). Having that “experience” on their college application may give them a leg up on the competition, but I don’t think their experience would be objectively better than what a “crap job” could provide–a job where they may make friends and contacts, gain recognition, learn some practical skills, and earn a paycheck.
When I was a teenager my parents didn’t particularly push me or discourage me from getting a job in the summer. They would have been opposed to significant work hours during the school year because school had to be the focus.
Actually I got some work mowing lawns and pet sitting in the neighborhood. I don’t think it was a big deal either way in my future development. I never followed through getting a formal job in the summer. I guess it was a bit of a waste that I didn’t, some summers at least. Two summers in HS I got into competitive summer programs (music, academic) which I think were more valuable as experiences than a menial job. My first ‘real’ job was required in my college curriculum, ‘interning’ (I guess you’d say now) as an industrial worker. That was a learning experience I think. I got along OK with it, but experiencing first hand where you realize you don’t want your life to go I think is worthwhile compared to just hearing about it, was for my young brain anyway. And again it had some direct relevance to my engineering studies.
With our kids we were even more hands off about it. As long as it was clear work during the school year was not interfering with school work it was OK, not especially encouraged. They all worked in food service jobs in the neighborhood in later HS years and some college summers. We did try to push the idea of higher value added internship type jobs, but while some of them also got into competitive summer academic/leadership type programs in HS, internship type things not really, or not till college.
Wow. You speak so highly of kids’ abilities in one sentence and then take a very cynical view of them in another.
If a parent is literally having to drive Junior to the yogurt shop and forcing him to fill out the job application at gun point, then yeah, I agree that Junior probably isn’t going to be a good employee and he’s probably not going to spend his money wisely without some supervision. But I think most people in this thread understood what I meant by “push”. The same way you “push” a kid to practice their violin or “push” them to study for the SAT. If moderate nudging isn’t enough to get your kid to show any interest in these things, then all the pushing in the world will probably do more harm than good. I was assuming this didn’t need to be said.
I am wondering what you would do if you had a “Junior” who was resistant to all forms of pushing except the threatening kind. Whatever thing you push him into, he could rebel by doing the bare minimum and using the opportunity to indulge vices. Put him in a band camp, and he might just have sex behind the bleachers and get someone pregnant. Do you not put him in band camp then? Is the answer just let him do whatever he wants and let him grow up at his own pace? I don’t know, not being a parent. Curious what you think the answer is.
My older sister was the one who “pushed” me and my twin to get a job. We had just turned 15 and we were content wasting our summer break watching TV and playing Nintendo. Older Sis came over one afternoon and noticed our slothfulness and told us rather pointedly that we needed to get jobs. Especially if we wanted a car one day (that was when the light bulb came on for me). The idea that we could actually get a job had never occurred to us before that moment, because our parents hadn’t presented it as an option for us. And that was the only “pushing” we needed. Somehow, once the paychecks started rolling in, we were able to avoid spending all our money on dope and video games. I’m guessing it’s because our parents were still supervising what the fuck we were doing, since we were still kids living under their roof. But that’s just a guess.
When I was in high school, I, and two of my girl friends, were not able to get paycheck jobs, because we all had two working parents. The idea was, mom did not want to be Superwoman: work full time, then come home and cook a full dinner, make the house spotless, do everyone’s laundry…So I did that at my house, Lisa did that at her house, and Donna did that at her house, plus supervising her slightly younger siblings.
So were we working, or not?
I know one thing I learned from that: insight into why some women get really bent out of shape when people say to them, “So you never worked?” “Why, no, I only raised X# of kids, kept a house running like an oiled machine, took care of my husband’s physical needs, ran errands, and a million other things. But not work or anything like that, no.” :mad:
If you look at successful people from a well-off family the same rules apply.
Learning the lessons of hard work is best done early in life.
I think the “anti-job” people here are the best reading, with Ruken being top of the list. They have a huge list of in their words “supposed” (read: actual) benefits of teens having a real job, and then pooh-pooh all of those benefits as insubstantial and airily assert that good parents are able to inculcate all those values themselves without the kid needing a job at all.
I’m in the “jobs do way more good than harm” camp. I worked from age 10 at various things, and worked full time from age 16, and moved out on my own at 17. I learned WAY more from working “real jobs” than I ever did in high school or academia. And I say this as somebody who’s published in two STEM fields, and who is currently in a very science and math-driven field, and although I don’t have a Phd myself, I employ a number of Phd’s.
Let’s be honest, if you’re as smart as most folk on this board are, high school doesn’t actually teach you much. I considered high school a colossal waste of time while I was in it, and looking back now I think the exact same thing but with more intensity, because of all the better stuff I could have been doing with high-school-age-me’s time.
I learned way more about how the world works and what was and wasn’t important via the jobs I worked through high school and college than I ever learned in a classroom.
And looking around at my siblings and their friends, the ones who worked a job in high school (mostly older) all had their lives a lot more together at the same age than the (mostly younger) ones who were in the “but precious Timothy needs all his time for studying” or “but we can’t FORCE them to get a job if they don’t want to” camps, because those kids generally flail about aimlessly as teens and then again as adults. And then their parents wonder why they’re still living with them at age 24 doing nothing but eating cheetos and playing video games.
And for those parents in the “my kids need to spend all their time studying” camp, I pity your kids, because they’re either dumb or browbeaten by you. Kids can carry more than one load in life, and arguably it’s carrying multiple loads and responsibilities in multiple domains that most characterizes successful adults. You robbing them of the opportunity to develop that skillset earlier than other folk isn’t doing them any favors.
From my own experience, my parents would have done me much more benefit learning how to enjoy their own jobs and lives in general than in trying to instill what they thought were valuable lessons in their kids. Kids are dumb in many ways, but they intuit things they aren’t mature enough to understand or process properly, and these things will imprint deeply in a way that pressure and lectures can’t hope to measure up to. Expecting kids to believe something you don’t really believe yourself does way more harm than good.
The values I did manage to hold on to for my parents were the ones they didn’t bother trying to force on me, the ones I could sense actually brought them joy. The ones which they felt some obligation about but which for some reason they just could not become aware of was actually making them miserable and was just some dysfunctional artifact of their own upbringing tended to poison me against them, even if there existed some healthier version of that value, because it was just so damn difficult to remove the dysfunctional imprint from my, and my siblings psyche.
Simply enjoying your own choices, and being honest about your own experiences, is a far better example than trying to gaslight your kids into doing things a particular way.
It is also just an amazingly stupid and shortsighted type of reasoning. It astounds me that people really think about things so shallowly. They just associate two things blindly without actually thinking about why they are related, or what was the important element.
I don’t agree 100% with your take on this, but this aspect I do. Or, really, perhaps the whole idea of discussing stuff like this in the internet vacuum is for people to say how what they did or are doing things is THE way, stripped of the conventions of face to face discussion where you have to at least pretend you’re listening to anyone else’s opinion. 
A personal finance oriented forum I frequent often has threads about this general kind of thing, could be kid’s jobs but also spending on them, allowances, leaving them money, etc. always with lots of people implying that some particular approach to those narrow issues is the essence of ‘inculcating good values’. But in real complicated life IMO, and IME as a kid and a parent of grown kids, it’s impossible to get a meaningful picture of what values a disembodied voice on the internet actually inculcates in their kids from simple discussion of something like ‘push’ kids to get a job, or how big an allowance, how long they stay at home, etc. It’s hard to know that as the parent, IME how you’re really doing.
Again with me, my parents wanted ‘precious Corry’ (though here’s a secret, that’s not my real name :eek:)’ to focus on his studies. To some degree depends how fruitful it could possibly be for the kid to study. I was first in my HS class so it wasn’t a total waste to focus on studies, and spending a lot of time on music I believe also paid off (though I didn’t have the same talent for it) so I wasn’t a one-note Corry to prospective colleges. OTOH maybe I could have had a job in HS and also done those things. I know I don’t particularly regret not having a real job in HS, but of course that also depends on subsequent rolls of the dice. In college I had jobs per curriculum requirements and voluntarily in summer sometimes. To never have any job up thru finishing college? Yeah OK I might also broadbrush that as non optimal in most cases.
Again with our kids we were more laid back in general than my pretty hyper parents. The kids got jobs in HS because they wanted to. But frankly they weren’t the same kind of academic performers as I was, nor was I on the level of my dad (graduated college at 19). But he was pretty unhappy when I was a kid, and the fact that I so far surpassed him financially, though I wasn’t as smart, also eventually bugged him. So successful parenting was lose-lose for him personally, seemed to me.
I’m fine with my kids’ values and how they’re doing generally as adults, not without any quiet complaint or even still gentle nudging now, but basically. But I often read stuff on the internet from either parents in progress or I guess extremely self assured people and I wonder what world they live in where they think simple inputs give simple predictable outputs in parenting. Besides basics like a stable abuse free home, don’t be an out of control substance abuser (my dad was a functioning drunk which hurt sometimes but wasn’t a huge deal to me overall), etc. A lot of the rest is a genetic and environmental crap shoot I think.
I’m not “anti-job”. I had one and it was a positive experience. I already wrote this. You may have some science experience, but I bet those PhDs you hire can give you some tips about the uselessness of extrapolating your childhood into anything meaningful to others. The OP asks if parents who don’t push their teenagers to get jobs are doing bad by them. No, they are not, so long as they are otherwise parenting sufficiently. Another poster rephrased this to if parents who don’t push their teens towards self-reliance doing them a disservice. Yes, I believe they are. But a job a 16 isn’t the only way to learn self-reliance. And pretending otherwise is a recipe for missing out on other opportunities.
This is your perception of these parents. I doubt all of them think exactly like this; it just may seem that way because you disagree with them or don’t share their vehemence on a particular subject.
I had jobs as a teenager and plan to impress the importance of having one to my kids, but I bristle (and laugh) at the assumption that this desire stems from me being biased towards the way I was raised. There are plenty of things from my unbringing that I have rejected and have no shame in saying so. Religion is a big one. If someone were to start a thread asking whether parents should push their children to attend church, my answer would be no and I would use my own experience to explain why. Frankly, just like anyone answering “yes” or “it depends”. That is what we all do.
Corporal punishment is the same thing. My parents spanked me but I’m anti-spanking. It doesn’t require a dogmatic or biased mindset to firmly believe that parents shouldn’t hit their kids. It also doesn’t require one to believe teens in general benefit from having jobs.
If you have a kid like this, you have more to worry about than whether or not they have a job at the yogurt shop.
Teens have be “pushed” all the time to do what’s good for them. Cleaning their rooms, waking up in time to catch the bus, studying instead of goofing off. Pushing them to get a job is no different.