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Category: Jobs, Work, Careers
When I was a teenager, you couldn't walk a block in my neighborhood without seeing this:
For those of you born within the last three decades, that's a teenager mowing a lawn. I know it's a bit of a shock, but for those of us who were around in the 80s, it was a fairly common thing. Back then teenagers...
WORKED.
I'm not talking about a 16-year-old working to buy a new car, either. No, back then you hit 13 or 14 and you did little things to earn money. Maybe it was just helping out around the house but more often than not, if you were a boy, you were mowing yards. If you were a girl, you were babysitting.
Okay, even back then babysitting meant an hour or two with the kids and the rest of the evening, we'd be chatting on the phone with friends or searching the pantry for junk food. I didn't say we had a STRONG work ethic. Our parents were, after all, making us work. They also made us do chores if we expected our $20 a week allowance, which we were urged to save rather than spend on junk.
We, of course, didn't listen. We spent it on junk. Then we'd see something we really wanted and our parents would say, "Save your money." We'd realize that if we hadn't bought $80 in clothes we didn't need last month, we might have been able to afford that ugly yellow cassette player Walkman that was all the rage at the time.
When I turned 16, I was given a car. It was six years old and plain white. The agreement was, if they bought my car I'd get a job to pay for insurance, gas, and my other miscellaneous expenses. I even had to pay for my own hair spray and makeup by that time. My first job was at Burger King -- getting up at 5 a.m. to make biscuits every Saturday and Sunday. I was absolutely miserable, but my parents wouldn't let me quit. Not until I had another job lined up.
"You never quit one job without having another," my mom told me at the time. It was the most important job-related lesson I ever learned. To this day, I have NEVER quit a job without another one lined up. Even the job that had me in tears every day as I drove into downtown Nashville. Misery just made me search more aggressively.
After seven months at Burger King, my friend got me a job working in the concessions stand at the movie theater. BEST job I ever had. My boyfriend waxes nostalgic about his days as a lifeguard...my sweet memories are all of my days shoveling popcorn. Why?
Because of the friendships I made. The fun we had. I could see all the movies I wanted free of charge. We'd stand around talking, eating popcorn straight out of the bin. (Moviegoers beware -- we had our hands all over that stuff.) In between all that socializing, I learned important things -- work ethics sort of things that have carried me into the present day.
"I don't want my kids to work," I hear parents say all the time. "They should enjoy their childhood. There's plenty of time to work later."
I can appreciate that mentality. I just can't help but wonder if there's a connection between working from a young age and success later in life. Does one HAVE to bag groceries at sixteen to learn a work ethic? What DOES a 16-year-old do with his or her summers if not work?
Don't get me wrong. Even back in the 80s, there were plenty of spoiled rotten kids who were handed BMWs for their 16th birthday and never required to work. Maybe some of them even made successes of themselves despite not working until the day they left college. I don't know. I do know that THOSE were the kids who spent all summer partying. They slept all day to recover from last night's hangover. They would then go to the car wash to spend four hours detailing that car so they could cruise the park that night, looking to "pick up chicks."
It all goes back to the fact that I see not ONE teenager mowing yards in my neighborhood. After an endless search, someone finally found someone to come around and mow the seven or eight yards on our street that belong to people who can't or won't mow their own. He's in his 50s and owns a landscaping company, probably charging twice as much as a teenage boy. The one person I DO know who hired a teenager briefly said he did such a lousy job, he had to hire someone else to fix it.
Where are 13-year-olds? Sitting at home playing Wii or X Box or whatever today's latest popular game is. They're texting or Instant Messaging all day and watching movies on cable all night. They don't have to work -- if they want to learn how to mow a yard, there's probably a video game that will simulate it. After all, why would you want to actually DO something outside when you can play Wii basketball inside your parents' air conditioned house?
I can't help but wonder what these kids are learning. Even more importantly, these are our future LEADERS. If parents don't instill a work ethic from a young age, who will be leading our corporations in the future? Will there be a video game that will do it all for them? If not, we're all going to be in trouble.
3:55 PM
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