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

[bump]

@SmellMyWort

Gaping absence or just so obvious to be not worth mentioning?

So obvious as to not mention. Sheesh. My parents footed the bill for college as well, so it’s not like they weren’t disengaged or anything.

The point was that my parents were willing to buy me say… Levi’s jeans, but if I wanted Girbaud or Z Cavaricci (that was what was cool when I was 17-18, as embarrassing as that is), then I had to buy them myself, or in a few cases, pay the difference.

If I wanted a video game, that was my problem, as was eating out with my friends, etc… I mean, I could occasionally cadge a few bucks off my parents if I was temporarily short-handed, but I didn’t get an allowance or anything like that, and getting cash from them was far more the exception than the rule.

And yes at 13, I could and did mow yards in the neighborhood cat/dog/plant-sat when people went out of town, and a little bit of actual child-sitting in there too. I also washed/waxed cars a few times as well. All combined, I think I made something like 30 bucks a week in the summer, and considerably less during the school year. I basically would save like crazy at birthdays and Xmas, and during the summer, and then ration that out during the school year. Same thing in college, but on a larger pay and expenditure scale, and at some point, apartment rent became my problem as well.

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

@you_with_the_face

The analogy isn’t unclear; your position on jobs is unclear. So please clarify: what are you advocating as it relates to the subject of the thread? Be specific and please, no more rhetorical questions.

Well, but what I advocate is asking those questions. I don’t pretend to have a settled answer. It may be a good thing to push children to work, but if so, I’m struck by the implicit judgement of the way things are inherent in considering it to be so, and wondering if that judgement is accurate. But, I didn’t see much awareness of the underlying dilemma—that if it’s true that we need to push children to take ‘horrible’ jobs, either there’s an inherent horribleness to society we need to prepare them for, or human beings themselves are horrible if not forcibly corrected. So that’s what I came in to point out.

Monstro seems to be happy to take the first horn of the dilemma: society is broken, deal with it. You, as best as I can tell, seem to want to take the second horn: humans are bad, so they need to be corrected, by force if need be.

To me, this is somewhat surprising: I would have thought the conclusion was sufficiently repugnant to call into question its premises, which is what I’ve been trying to do, admittedly without terribly great success.

This may seem unkind, but I don’t think analogies are your strong suit. The above question doesn’t fit what we’re talking about. It should be “Are parents who don’t push their kids to get cooking experience (because they might get burned) doing bad them?” That’s a closer mirror to “Are parents who don’t push their kids to get job experience (because crappiness) doing by bad by them?”

That seems a way worse analogy to me. Cooking pertains to a basic biological need, nourishment, without which we couldn’t survive. Work is not such a biological need; people can not work and survive. To the extent that the dilemma arises, there’s thus no question which horn we need to take: that’s how the world is, and it’s not going to change.

So in the case of cooking, we have a clear necessity that is being met, whereas in the case of horrible jobs, that’s at the very least not so clear.

The point I was trying to make with my analogy was a different one. It pertains to the question of which means are appropriate to achieve what ends: so, the (ostensible) end is to get children to function well in the world. Am I justified in pushing them to take horrible jobs? Compare: the end is to get children to avoid hot objects. Am I justified in pushing their hands onto the stove top?

Most people would answer this latter question with ‘no’; but so far, you’ve not given any reasons as to why one would have to answer the former one with ‘yes’, instead, that couldn’t equally well be used in support of answering the latter one in that way.

So what is it that justifies me in pushing my children to take horrible jobs, but not in pushing their hands onto something hot? If the achievement of the ends is all the justification that’s needed, both should be permissible.

How would you answer this question? Just give it a try.

My answer, such as it is, nevertheless remains the same: pushing somebody to do something is always ethically questionable, and hence, we should carefully investigate our justification for doing so.

Do you think the moral issue remains if the “push” takes the form of ceasing or decreasing their allowance (as what happened to bump)? Perhaps no, if you think 15-18 year olds are entitled to money from their parents. Perhaps you think it’s immoral to expect them to start picking up the cost for their own non-essential expenses, even when there are opportunities for them to do. Or perhaps you don’t think this. It isn’t clear to me what your positions are.

I do absolutely believe it remains a moral issue, yes. Although I also don’t think that parents have to cater to their children’s every whim.

[you_with_the_face]

Cooking pertains to a basic biological need, nourishment, without which we couldn’t survive. Work is not such a biological need; people can not work and survive.

It is through work that we obtain the resources needed for survival, and that’s the case if the work is unpaid or paid.

Plenty of people can’t or don’t cook and yet they survive by depending on others who do cook. So too do people who refuse to work.

That is all I’m going to respond to because honestly, as long as you see cooking as more essential to survival than working to get the money that provides you with food to cook, a kitchen to cook in, and the stove you’re fixated on being burning by, then we’re at an impasse.

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

@you_with_the_face

That is all I’m going to respond to because honestly, as long as you see cooking as more essential to survival than working to get the money that provides you with food to cook, a kitchen to cook in, and the stove you’re fixated on being burning by, then we’re at an impasse.

This is what I mean by letting go of ingrained assumptions. There’s a possible world in which we don’t need to work for money to buy stuff (the US in the 1960s very nearly introduced universal basic income), or even need money at all, but there’s no possible world in which we don’t have to eat.

[monstro]

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

This is what I mean by letting go of ingrained assumptions. There’s a possible world in which we don’t need to work for money to buy stuff (the US in the 1960s very nearly introduced universal basic income), or even need money at all, but there’s no possible world in which we don’t have to eat.

This world may be possible, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to transform into it any time soon. A parent who prepares their offspring for the world that could be but not the world that is and will be isn’t doing a good job.

And again, you seem to be excluding a huge middle. You can be an idealist and fight hard for a world where there are no horrible jobs and still push your kid to take a job–horrible or no. People who don’t know what’s it like in the trenches tend to be the people who ignore the trenches and the people who work in them. People are attracted to politicians with working-class roots (like AOC) because these are people who know first-hand what a hard life is like and thus have the most motivation to fix the system. It’s clear the current American president doesn’t know what it is like to work a low-status, low-paying, physically taxing job and everything about him and his policies demonstrates this ignorance.

“Letting go of ingrained assumptions” is great and all for navel-gazing jackoff exercises on the internet. But most people don’t have time for too much of that. Neither do their children.

I don’t think there’s inherent value to working horrible jobs. I think working any job–horrible or non-horrible–can teach someone valuable skills, but I’m not stupid enough to think that any “joe job” can be transformative. However, I certainly wouldn’t exclude my hypothetical kid from a job opportunity just because it might be horrible. If it’s so bad that it completely demoralizes them, I would encourage them to quit and find something else. But if they endure whatever is thrown at them, I would cheer. Because it means I’ve managed to raise a bad ass. I think we need more bad asses in our society, because bad asses are the ones who fix broken systems. Fragile people who avoid struggle because it’s “perfectly rational” always expect someone else to save the world. That might be smart, but it’s not good.

FWIW, I don’t think we agree on how this society is “broken”. I don’t think the existence of “low status” jobs is a problem at all. I think the problem is that society does not value the people who work “low status” jobs. They are underpaid, abused, and exploited. Forced to live in the worst neighborhoods and attend the worst schools. Society treats poor people like animals. I don’t think we fix this system by teaching middle-class kids they are too precious and special to do menial jobs. We only entrench stigma and prejudice if we do this.

I am not advocating for parents to subject kids to “horrible” jobs just to toughen them up. I think a job can give kids an experience that teaches them not to take for granted the comforts they enjoy at home. A job can give them an exposure to life that isn’t constantly fun, pleasant, and self-esteem affirming, so they aren’t shocked once they enter the workforce as a full-fledged adult. A job helps to shake a kid from the kind of doe-eye innocence that is cute in teenagers but exasperating in a 25-year-olds.

[you_with_the_face]

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

This is what I mean by letting go of ingrained assumptions. There’s a possible world in which we don’t need to work for money to buy stuff (the US in the 1960s very nearly introduced universal basic income), or even need money at all, but there’s no possible world in which we don’t have to eat.

It’s also possible for a world in which no cooking is necessary too. Maybe we could create technology that would make ready-to-eat food to materialize at the push of a button, Star Trek NG style.

But I’m not seeing you pointing to this idealistic (and improbable) possibility to argue cooking skills are non-essential for survival. This just seems like a position you’re reserving for the boogeyman called working.

Even in prehistorical times, people worked. They hunted and foraged, they constantly had to maintain their weather beaten shelters, they had to make clothing, and treat the sick, etc. The jobs we have today are proxies for the unpaid labor that was a matter of course for our pre-industrial ancestors. So money isn’t the point; it’s the work that must be done to ensure basic needs are met.

[you_with_the_face]

@monstro

“Letting go of ingrained assumptions” is great and all for navel-gazing jackoff exercises on the internet.

Navel-gazing is exactly what this is. When I opined earlier in this thread that job experience gives teenagers practical insight into the real world, little did I know that someone would help me prove that by arguing work is less essential for survival than cooking.

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@monstro

I think the problem is that society does not value the people who work “low status” jobs. They are underpaid, abused, and exploited. Forced to live in the worst neighborhoods and attend the worst schools. Society treats poor people like animals. I don’t think we fix this system by teaching middle-class kids they are too precious and special to do menial jobs. We only entrench stigma and prejudice if we do this.

I think it’s more of a notion that if someone’s working a low status job, then they are either too lazy or stupid to do anything better, and then people look down on them.

But that’s where I struggle; I can see why someone might look askance at someone who had the deck stacked in their favor (like say someone who grew up middle/upper middle class and didn’t suffer any catastrophic events), and despite that, ends up working as a janitor or dishwasher. That indicates more than a bad roll of the dice- it usually means some combination of poor decision making skills, extreme sloth, a bad/entitled attitude, and/or extreme stubbornness. Your archetypical loser, in other words.

But what if someone really IS kind of slow, and working as a janitor is right about in their wheelhouse? They don’t deserve any opprobrium for working that job- intellectual capacity isn’t something that we have a lot of control over, and if that’s at the level that someone can handle well, then we should respect that. Or for that matter, if they’re from a background where their educational and social background only prepares them for being a janitor/dishwasher/etc… like for example, the El Salvadoran immigrant I mentioned upthread. He wasn’t educated, and didn’t have a dime when he got here- dishwashing was where he started. And in that case, working the jobs that he did, as hard as he did had a lot of dignity.

A lot of people only see things from their own narrow perceptions- they assume for whatever reason, that everyone working those jobs are basically middle class people of normal intelligence, and who have “dropped the ball” in a big way.

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

@monstro

This world may be possible, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to transform into it any time soon. A parent who prepares their offspring for the world that could be but not the world that is and will be isn’t doing a good job.

I never said that they should. Look, I’m kinda getting too many words put into my mouth here for this to be worthwhile, but to try and set things at least a little straight:

I don’t think parents shouldn’t prepare their children for the tough realities out there.
I don’t think children should be coddled, or shielded from struggle, or anything like that.
I don’t think it’s a bad idea for children / teenagers to get work experience.
I don’t think menial jobs deserve low status.
I don’t think there’s some utopian society around the corner for which we should prepare our children.
I don’t think we should teach children that they’re too precious for menial jobs.
I don’t think the existence of menial jobs is problematic in itself.

I haven’t said any of these things, and nothing I said implies I believe any of them.

Now, I don’t want to deny anybody the fun of fighting against strawmen, but just in case anybody would care to address something I actually said, what I’m arguing is roughly the following.

The claim is that pushing children to do menial work prepares them to withstand the rigors of adult working life. That has the form of: subject them to something they don’t like, in order to teach them something.

This needs justification. Whenever we subject others to something they don’t like, we need to have a good moral reason to do so. I hope that much is obvious.

When we submit children to corporal punishment, in order to get them to learn a lesson, it’s widely agreed that we aren’t acting morally, even though we may succeed in teaching the intended lesson. Hence, there are cases where the form of ‘subject them to something they don’t like, in order to teach them something’ isn’t sufficient.

So it follows that merely teaching something is not in all cases sufficient justification to subject children to something they don’t like. Is it in the present case?

I entered the thread with a different argument. The belief that we need to subject children to something they don’t like (sorry for the clumsy phrasing, but using other words seems to have a triggering effect on some), in order to get them to function in society, entails that either children or society are such that children need to be subjected to stuff they don’t like to function. In other words, the idea of a blessed land in which there’s no such coercion—call it Cockaigne, Utopia, or Heaven—isn’t possible. Either humans, if never subjected to adversity, necessarily grow up wicked, or society is such that humans must be bent out of shape to fit it.

To me, that’s a depressing conclusion, and one that I would very much like not to be true. (Note that I’m not saying that therefore, it can’t be true.) Hence, I thought it worth it to examine its premise, namely whether it’s in fact the case that children need to be made to endure stuff they don’t want to to grow up right.

Again, that doesn’t mean that I think children should never endure suffering or hardship, only eat candy and watch cartoons all day. Life entails its share of suffering every which way. What I’m wondering about is the notion of having to be pushed—whether that’s in fact the only way. Whether I need to impose my agency on my child’s in that way.

Anyway. I’ve already expended too much energy in trying to explain myself.

FWIW, I don’t think we agree on how this society is “broken”. I don’t think the existence of “low status” jobs is a problem at all. I think the problem is that society does not value the people who work “low status” jobs.

Well, if it did, then they wouldn’t be low status jobs anymore, no?

@you_with_the_face

Navel-gazing is exactly what this is. When I opined earlier in this thread that job experience gives teenagers practical insight into the real world, little did I know that someone would help me prove that by arguing work is less essential for survival than cooking.

Eating. Not cooking.

[monstro]

@bump

I think it’s more of a notion that if someone’s working a low status job, then they are either too lazy or stupid to do anything better, and then people look down on them.

But that’s where I struggle; I can see why someone might look askance at someone who had the deck stacked in their favor (like say someone who grew up middle/upper middle class and didn’t suffer any catastrophic events), and despite that, ends up working as a janitor or dishwasher. That indicates more than a bad roll of the dice- it usually means some combination of poor decision making skills, extreme sloth, a bad/entitled attitude, and/or extreme stubbornness. Your archetypical loser, in other words.

I too probably have a similar prejudice, but I have been shaken out of it somewhat over the past few years. Is a 23-year-old college graduate really a “loser” for working at McDonalds while waiting for a prospective employer to be impressed with his anthropology degree and hire him for a “good” job? Sure, maybe he was a fool for majoring in anthropology, but is it foolish to listen to parents and teachers, all of whom are telling you to follow your dreams? Middle and upper-middle class Boomers fed their kids the “follow your dreams” message and now a lot of them are negatively judging the ones who discovered this is not good career advice. A lot of kids are also taught it doesn’t matter what college you to go or what coursework you take or how much student debt you take on. They later realize the truth after their “bad” choices result in disappointing job prospects and poverty.

The bad choices people make can frequently be traced back to their well-intentioned but uninformed parental advisors.

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[monstro]

Half Man Half Wit, most of the adminstrative assistants at my workplace are low on the totem pole. Relative to everyone else, they have “low status”. We could all make the same base salary and the adminstrative assistants would still have low status given where they are in the power structure.

There are some underpaid positions in society that have some status. There are also jobs that don’t have a lot of prestige that still manage to garner decent wages. A janitor and a teacher may both make $36,000 a year, but one enjoys more status than the other. A veteran city bus driver can earn more than an entry-level engineer. But the latter has more status than the former. Status isn’t all dollars and cents.

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@monstro

The bad choices people make can frequently be traced back to their well-intentioned but uninformed parental advisors.

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True. I remember my parents saying basically to follow my dreams, but that some dreams may not come with a big paycheck, and that it was basically my decision to make as to where I set that line between following dreams and not making much money versus doing something I don’t love and making a good living.

In the end, I got lucky and found something that I love as much as I think I can as far as the working world is concerned, AND that pays pretty well.

But I can definitely see how if my academic inclination had been toward literary criticism or some other humanities subject that isn’t lucrative, how I’d have had to make a harder choice.

That said, I was more talking about those people we know who had parents willing to pay for college, a good high school education, etc… and who ended up waiting tables or being a “bartender” at a TGI Fridays as their actual career, because they made bad choices/partied too much/screwed around. I have a cousin like that- he only turned out ok because his parents were wealthy and essentially gave him a huge second chance to turn it around and go back to college in his late 20s after he fucked it all up.

And I’m not talking about those folks who are say… huge cyclists and choose to work at bike shops because they just love cycling that much that they center their lives around it. That’s more of a choice to follow your dreams while being aware that bike mechanics don’t make a whole lot of money.

[you_with_the_face]

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

Eating. Not cooking.

You said this:

Cooking pertains to a basic biological need, nourishment, without which we couldn’t survive. Work is not such a biological need; people can not work and survive.

The foolishness in this idea may be evident to you now, but perhaps not when you posted it?

Cooking is to eating as working is to acquiring life-essential resources. Without someone’s labor (either your own or the farmer who indirectly is paid when groceries are purchased), you won’t even have food to eat.

Your position, strippped down to essence, is that it’s immoral to make your kid do anything they don’t want to do. Even if that means they will be left without experiences that will prepare them for a life on their own.

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

@you_with_the_face

The foolishness in this idea may be evident to you now, but perhaps not when you posted it?

The immediate end of cooking—acquiring food—is essential for survival. The immediate end of work—acquiring money—is not.

Your position, strippped down to essence, is that it’s immoral to make your kid do anything they don’t want to do. Even if that means they will be left without experiences that will prepare them for a life on their own.

It’s really not, no.

[monstro]

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

The immediate end of cooking—acquiring food—is essential for survival. The immediate end of work—acquiring money—is not.

Do you live in a place where food is free? In my world, food costs money. So in my world, money is essential for survival.

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[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

@monstro

Do you live in a place where food is free? In my world, food costs money. So in my world, money is essential for survival.

As I said:

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

There’s a possible world in which we don’t need to work for money to buy stuff (the US in the 1960s very nearly introduced universal basic income), or even need money at all, but there’s no possible world in which we don’t have to eat.

[monstro]

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

As I said:

And there is a possible world where people have been genetically modified to photosynthesize and thus don’t have to eat at all. We aren’t living in that world, though. So I don’t see how talking about that hypothetical world is going to help us deal with our very real world.

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[you_with_the_face]

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

The immediate end of cooking—acquiring food—is essential for survival. The immediate end of work—acquiring money—is not.

Not all work is paid, so money is not a requirement. Subsistence farmers who live off the land do hard labor all day; they tend to their crops and animals. But they eat what they grow and don’t receive any money for this labor.

In industrial societies, the vast majority of people don’t raise their own food. They have to pay someone else to do that, and that means taking a job that gives you money.

I kind of feel like this really basic stuff here.

And by the way, the immediate end of cooking is not acquiring food. Food has to first be acquired before it can be cooked. Not all food has to be cooked, either. Just had a nectarine and yesterday I had sushi. This analogy is not serving you very well!

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

So I guess that’s a no on actually engaging with my arguments, then. Fair enough, I suppose.

[monstro]

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

So I guess that’s a no on actually engaging with my arguments, then. Fair enough, I suppose.

Make an argument that is relevant to the OP, which poses a question about parenting in the world we currently inhabit rather than a hypothetical world, and maybe someone will engage with it.

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