I am not a parent, and I don’t pretend to be super knowledgeable about parenting. I know it’s challenging stuff, which is why I have never had any desire to be a parent. And I too have noticed that people can be so absolute in their opinions about child-rearing. I did not mean to be one of those people, and the discussion we’ve had in this thread has made me back down from my initial stance. I think pushing kids to do something productive and challenging (even if it isn’t “OMG FUN!” and doesn’t necessarily look good on college applications) is really what’s most important. I think getting a job is an efficient and economical way to get this experience, but it certainly isn’t the only way.
I was a hot mess in a lot of ways as a teen. I was okay in the intelligence department but didn’t come across that way all the time due to physical and social awkwardness. I had confidence in a couple of areas but was a big ole scaredy-cat in others. I was pushed academically in school, but not socially. I steered clear of social situations because it was pretty damn easy to, as someone who was a big ole introvert. My parents didn’t know I had social weaknesses because they didn’t pay enough attention to stuff like that. I didn’t even know.
At home, I could let the phone ring and wait for someone else to pick up. If I had to make a call, I would beg my twin to do it for me (she would yell at me for being a big baby, but her shaming never worked). However, on the job, I couldn’t be a baby. No one was going to rescue me from the mile long line of customers waiting for me to take their order. It was either sink or swim. And yeah, those people hurled abuse at me and made me cry a couple of times. Once I cried and my nose started to bleed at the same time, and because I was running the register all by myself, it took awhile for help to arrive. It was a crappy day. But I gotta think having that kind of crappy day when I was a 16-year-old made me better prepared to handle the many crappy days waiting for me in college and adulthood. It’s not that I think having a job as a teenager made me an awesome 20-something. I was actually a hot mess 20-something too! I just wonder how worse of an emotional basketcase I may have been as a neurotic 20-something if I did not had my skin toughened as a “kid” concession stand operator. Perhaps things would have turned out the same way, but I dunno. And yeah, I guess I could be I’m just romanticizing an otherwise ridiculous experience (Lord knows that is an apt description for selling cotton candy and popcorn while dressed in a Confederate costume in 99-degree heat, with the theme to Driving Miss Daisy playing in a continuous loop all day long). But I don’t think I am. I think I really did get something out of those “crappy jobs”, even if I would not have been able to articulate those benefits at the time.
When I think about how prevalent social anxiety is among young people, I can’t help but to think that they’re spending way too much time studying and playing on their phones, and not enough time learning how to navigate spaces that aren’t catered to their self-esteems and comfort level, without their parents looking on.
Yes it is my perception. I remember writing it. I don’t claim somebody else wrote it. But seriously folks, ‘not sharing their vehemence’ is pretty much the same as what I said: I wonder what world they live in where they can be so sure a certain input gives a certain output in parenting. I ‘perceive’ that these people are kidding themselves.
Otherwise, I didn’t say anything about it necessarily being certainty that the way they were brought up was ‘the’ way. I think it can also be the opposite.
Corporal punishment can arguably violate the boundary condition I mentioned (though ‘arguably’ as in people can debate it depending what exactly). That is, a stable abuse free home without out of control substance abuse by the parents is a necessity. Though without stretching ‘abuse’ to mean a parent asserting authority in any direction somebody else doesn’t like. But beyond that I think more humility in thinking we are so sure exactly what works best for kids is probably in order.
All I’m saying is don’t conflate having a strong opinion about something with believing a simple input will result in a predictable outcome. There are no doubt parents who think in such oversimplified ways, but it’s easy to misjudge others.
I have strong opinions about spanking, but that doesn’t mean I believe it is always going to cause harm or that not spanking them is guaranteed to produce perfect, non-traumatized kids. In a discussion, you very well might perceive me as thinking that though, because I won’t be bending over backwards to hedge and qualify my statements about why I’m against spanking in general.
I think that a job isn’t going to be a miracle turn-around for anyone. I think the general expectation that a kid should be busy, should have stuff going on, has to start way before the summer after sophomore year. My own experiences may be coloring this, but the parents I knew who really really pushed “job” --not “being busy” but explicitly "get a job-- were generally authoritarian parents who hadn’t really paid any attention to what the kid did before 16 as long as they were generally compliant. It was generally with a subtext that Work makes you who you are and unless the things you do earn a paycheck, they are meaningless.
Again, I"m a real fan of encouraging kids to be busy. I just don’t think “minimum wage service job” is qualitatively different from other sorts of projects, goals, whatever, that keep a kid busy. And that way of looking at the world–where you find problems you want to solve or things you want to create, and you go after them–needs to be inculcated much earlier than 15.
If I had a kid who was 16 and wasn’t like this at all? Who wanted to hang out and play video games and had no ambition? I have no fucking clue, because I like to think that long before we got to that point, there would have been a ton of other interventions, and how those turned out would shape my response at that late date. But without knowing how we got there, I can’t possibly tell you what I’d do.
I don’t think we are really that far apart on this. I’ve never said I would discourage a kid from working, nor denied its many, many benefits. I just don’t think those benefits are unique to working, nor do I think it’s the best fit for every child.
I just think working a job teaches the basics like;
Show up on time.
Only take breaks when told.
Dress appropriately.
Learn to take orders.
And then their is the thing of learning to put money into your checking account, learning about taxes, and learn how many hours you have to work to buy this or that.
I dont know about studies but I watch alot of biographies and I’m amazed how many famous celebrities all did basic jobs. In fact its interesting how many of them did basic jobs as they were starting out in there careers.
HERE is a site where stars talk about their earlier jobs. Everything from mowing lawns to carrying luggage to waitressing.
Its weird to think that that girl behind the counter of a Dairy Queen or the kid carrying your luggage will someday be famous.
Young adults who have developed a high EQ (take orders from bosses, play well with the other boys and girls, etc.), have good executive functioning (show up on time, handle routine tasks, etc.) and appreciate education will do better in life. That should be really obvious.
As someone who teaches students with a range of ages and abilities, I’m constantly reminded of the wide spectrum students fall on.
My best friend in high school hit the parents jackpot. His older brother became a doctor, he’s a scientist, one sister has her own company, and the others (they are Mormon so there’s a bunch of them) all did well.
They all got scholarships and went to great schools.
By the end of high school, all of them had high EQs and executive functioning, which they developed through means other than part time jobs.
Even with great parents, some kids don’t learn these things.
I think part time jobs can help some kids develop these skills and abilities. So can other things.
I don’t believe that parent who don’t push their kids into part time jobs are necessarily doing them a disservice. I do think that parents who don’t attempt to help their kids develop these skills and abilities are doing them a disservice.
But isn’t that just terrible? I mean, it’s either a horrible indictment of society, or of humanity. Either society is such that human beings cannot function in it without having been more-or-less forcibly subjected to mindless menial routine work early in life, or human beings themselves are so wretched that they need to be cut to shape by harsh early job experience.
I can definitely see parents not wanting to inflict that on their offspring—either because they think that surely, their precious little snowflakes are not so rotten as to warrant such action, or because they hope that the society they’ve chosen to bring kids into isn’t, after all, so broken.
Yeah, and when those kids have a meltdown as a 22-year-old who can’t get a “good” job in an air-conditioned office and have to consider the “horrible” options of working at McDonalds or Walmart–which they have somehow convinced themselves they couldn’t possibly do because they are too introverted/socially anxious/special, are their parents going to keep shielding them from this broken society by supporting them financially indefinitely? Because I guess that’s a fair compromise.
But if their parents decide that 22 years old is old enough to face the harshness of the world on one’s own and they tell their hysterical kid to “suck it up, you Generation Z snowflake you”, then that’s pretty crappy.
This is a broken society. It’s a society where you can do all the right things and still wind up in a horrible job (menial or otherwise). I don’t think shielding kids from this reality is going to change this reality. I think it’s better to teach a kid that they can do a horrible job and come out of it alright than to allow them to think they are too precious and special to do anything but the best kind of jobs. Perhaps I’m extrapolating a little too much from the posts I’ve seen at Reddit, but I do think this attitude is way too prevalent. I don’t blame the “kids”. I blame the parents who implicitly and explicitly encourage this attitude, however well-intentioned.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean, particularly this last option. Is it really that crazy to believe doing work that is tough and not especially glamorous can build character, perspective, and humility? I plan to assign chores to my kids for this reason even though it’s within my means to pay for housekeeping.
What is crazy to me is thinking it isn’t fair to encourage your unskilled, inexperienced teenager to work a cash register or deep fat fryer somewhere, but then have absolutely no moral qualms with frequenting places that hire unskilled, inexperienced people to run cash registers and deep fat fryers.
But its entirely possible your point has flown clear over my head.
They might be, though. Maybe after receiving sufficient indoctrination to function in a broken system, there is no more inclination to change it. After all, if the system is truly broken, then disillusionment upon being fully exposed to it sounds like a healthy reaction. Maybe it takes a critical mass of that to effect change?
Well see, there’s just this unstated assumption that without putting humans through a phase of suffering, they will lack character, perspective, and humility. That, in other words, humans must be affected in their natural development in such a way as to steer its course from where it would normally end up. So either that place where it would normally end up (whatever it may be) is a bad one, or it’s one that’s unfit for society.
“Humans must endure some measure of strife to be good” says that otherwise, humans are bad, and “humans must be bent into shape to function in society” says that society is contrary to humans’ natural state. Subjecting people to strife can only be justified if it serves to reduce strife in total. But does it? Is there no possible society such that we could subject our children to markedly less suffering in order to function within it?
I don’t pretend to know the answer to that, but I sometimes wonder that the question doesn’t ever really get asked. It seems that either we accept that the world is rotten at its core (to put it somewhat overly dramatic), or, if we have hope that a better society exists, we should try our damnedest to work towards it.
But if one is not in the position to see how broken society is because their parents have kept them in a protective bubble their whole lives, how does anything change then? Don’t such people tend to grow into contemptible creatures who are so disconnected from reality that they think getting a “good” job is as simple as doing everything that Mummy and Daddy told them to do? Don’t they become the fools who blame the poor for not having dedicated their adolescent summers to band camp and SAT prep classes like they did? Don’t they become the dangerous morons who think a “living wage” is a buncha bullshit, since no one except stupid people are making minimum wage and they are living with parents anyway.
Even in a perfect utopian, there will be jobs that are “horrible” and no one wants to do, but that must be done. Seems to me that in a perfect utopia, everyone would be encouraged to do these jobs for a little while just so they can may have respect for these jobs and the people who choose to do them. What do you think?
You might be interested in the concept of hormesis.
Gotta be honest, though. I get tired of hearing internet edgelords rail against the “system”. The system has always been broken, and the pampered middle-class has largely not cared about it because they benefited from it. It’s only now, when middle-class people are feeling the boot heel of capitalism on their necks, that we’re suddenly hearing cries about how broken the system is. No one seemed to care when it was only the large masses of poor folks who were screaming. And no one ever encourages poor people to just “sit out” out of the system to rebel against its brokenness. No, they get accused of being lazy slackers when they do that.
No, it’s more like “humans need to be challenged and exposed to things outside of their comfort zone to emotionally and mentally grow.” Calling it strife is such a melodramatic way of framing things that a part of me thinks you’re being ironic.
No, it’s more like “humans need experiences that prepare them for functioning in society, in order to function well in society.” Getting and keeping a job is one of those experiences.
Humans’ “natural state” starts off immature and ignorant, so yeah, between infancy and adulthood, some “bending” must occur. People who behave like tantruming toddlers or expect to be treated like fairy princesses aren’t going to be able to hack very well in most workplaces.
If we were talking about something as vile and sadistic as torturing people for having the wrong sexual orientation or raping babies, it would make sense for us to be talking about the world being rotten. But we’re not. We’re talking teenagers working jobs that may or may not pay minimum wage and involve menial tasks like bagging groceries. So I can’t take what you are saying seriously.
As long as people keep pouring money into this so-called broken system by buying movie tickets, lattes, restaurant meals, groceries, mass produced clothing, trips to the amusement park, and the multitude of other offerings extracted from low wage labor, things will stay the same.
Enjoying these offerings on a routine basis but then having a moral problem with your teen doing the same kind of work that your favorite barista does…there is no rational defense for this.
Winky smilely aside, I hope you not under the impression that “guests” are freeloaders. Because I assure you that all “guests” are being bombarded with ads. Guests are also contributing content that attract paying members.
Yes, but one also gets bombarded by ads when… what was the list, again?.. when you go and purchase “movie tickets, lattes, restaurant meals, groceries, mass produced clothing, trips to the amusement park…”
The biggest difference between seeing ads at the grocery store or at Forever 21 and seeing them here is that you can pay not to see them here.
