<p>I can’t believe the amount of people on here who have kids who don’t work at all.</p>
<p>I am graduating high school this year and am currently working 2 jobs which comes out to around 25 hours per week while I’m in school. Over the summer I have a 3rd job lined up which will put me at around 50 hours per week along with a few lawns to mow every week. When your parents make you pay for everything yourself you learn to work and save money; I pay for my car, car insurance, gas, cell phone bill, and entertainment costs and have been doing this since I turned 16 and was forced to get a job. I will also be paying for my entire college education.</p>
<p>derek320: If no one have forced you to get a job at 16 and you had a choice to spend your time working on the job you did and something else. What would have you chosen and why?</p>
<p>If you have chosen the job you did then your job certainly not only have meaning in your life but would define your life. But if you would have chosen to spend that time on some other activity whether it was bonding with your friends or spending time on music or art or sports or travel then the job has no real meaning and is just a source of income to you.</p>
<p>When a child need to start paying for itself is the issue. For some it is 16, or 18 or 22. I think every parent have their own comfort zones. I don’t think children who start working early in life are at any advantage over those who start working late.</p>
Depends on what you mean by “late”. I can tell that work experience is very important in terms of landing a job after the person graduates from college. This experience could be through an internship – but having just gone through my daughter’s job search process as an observer, I can tell you that specific work experience was an important part of the application. (For example, among other things, the job my daughter was just hired for specified experience with “budget and office management” - since my d. was a poli sci major and not a business major, this is the sort of thing that she might have missed had she not held paying office jobs along the way).</p>
<p>calmom: I do understand the importance of relevant internship to your career or work experience in the field of your intended career. </p>
<p>But In the above post the reference is to the job for 16, 17 or 18 years old that have no relevance to your field of study or intended career. These jobs are taken to just get spending money.</p>
<p>A high school or college student working in the summer or during holidays is about much more about just earning spending money. For one thing, it’s about learning the value of money. That iPhone would take a minimum wage earner about two weeks to earn, not to mention the contract. That trip to Disneyland wold be about a week’s wages. A couple of weeks in Europe? They probably couldn’t earn that at all, even with a whole summer’s wages. Yes, I could pay for all those things for my daughter, and I have (well, not the iPhone, and the trip to Europe was a band trip), but still. I have been using the same old phone for over five years, and I couldn’t afford to go on the trip to Europe, because I sacrificed so she could have those things. So now she can work and help defray the costs of the modern teenage consumer lifestyle.
And time management-when working, your kid has less time to spend money, less time on Facebook, less time watching “America’s next Top Model”.
And, and…many, many benefits.</p>
<p>Some employers may care about those summer jobs. I don’t know how to link this, but the quote below is from an interview (The Corner Office) with the chief executive of The Onion which appeared in NYT on May 14.</p>
<p>“I want to know whether you were a kid who was entitled, whether you worked hard, whether you excelled at school, whether you held summer jobs, how hard you had to work, whether you got the jobs yourself, whether you got promoted. I want to know if youll work hard. Im hopelessly old-fashioned. I want people who really want to work hard. And I absolutely loathe a sense of entitlement.”</p>
<p>I thing for a parent it is important to instill the responsibilities in the child growing up but that doesn’t mean forcing them to do jobs they themselves won’t do.</p>
<p>We hire a lot of “New College Grad” and I’ve never heard anyone saying hire this or don’t hire the other because one has done a summer job while another hadn’t. A well spent summer interning even if it is volunteer, taking classes which might be relevant to the field of employment is considered much more desirable.</p>
<p>I agree with ParentofIvyHope. I started out picking apples when I was 16. My parents always pushed me to work. I worked the full time the summer before my senior year, during my senior year I had a co-op job so I worked 4 hours a day instead of going to school, and I worked full time the summer after. The day I left that job I had a 105 fever, strep throat and got chewed out by my boss for wanting to go home early. I tried to please everyone. By the time I was 25 I was burned out. I want better for my kid.</p>
<p>Also, I ended up with two bosses who had been hospitalized for mental problems! I learned the value of money and my parents were oblivious to the danger I was in while working.</p>
<p>Working when you are sick, having crazy bosses, welcome to the real world. Granted, picking apples and working with a 105 degree fever sound extreme. I don’t think that’s the true picture of work for most middle-class kids. And sure, if they want to do an internship or volunteer, it’s all valuable. But unless they are going to college to get their MRS. degree, our kids are being prepared for a very challenging employment environment, and the more experience they have, the better. I know some wealthy kids, friends of my D, whose tax lawyer daddies buy them brand-new cars, fund their private college education, take them to Europe as soon as the semester ends, and plan to buy them their first house and have the future son-in-law sign a pre-nup. My D got a car, and is getting the fully-funded education, but knows we expect to to work during summers. That is very fair and generous. And perhaps it’s one of the reasons she got into UCLA.</p>
<p>Would have been nice if someone had taught me what to do as a teenager when running into mentally ill bosses. If someone had even taught me how to say no when told to do a dangerous job it would have been great. These are things I am trying to teach my son.
My rant is done:-)</p>
<p>What would that be? I lined up my daughter’s first paying job for her when she was 14 – her job involved working in the summer for a company entering data into an Excel spreadsheet, for minimum wage. She also had to help out answering phones from time to time. I admit that database entry is tedious… but I’ve done plenty of it myself in my lifetime. And answered telephones. </p>
<p>However, I do have enough experience and education that I think that for the most part, it is a poor use of my time to be spent doing something that an entry level employee can do. Knowing how to work with an Excel spreadsheet has not hurt my daughter at all – she was expected to be able to do it on the first internship she got while in college, and it seems to be a skill desired for just about every post-college job she has been applying for. </p>
<p>My d. also has had jobs doing retail sales as well as bartending & catering support – it happens that I have never done those things, in part because I don’t think I’d be very good at them. (As a youngster I happened to prefer office work - typing, filing, etc.) But I don’t think of those things as being disreputable.</p>
<p>Now I certainly would not approve of my d. becoming a prostitute or a drug dealer, no matter how much she could earn that way – and not just because those things are illegal. In my life, the only “won’t do” jobs are things that I find morally reprehensible.</p>
<p>But there are all sorts of merely un-fun or unpleasant things that I do all the time for myself - for example, cleaning up dog poop or mopping the floors in my house. I don’t like doing those things so I wouldn’t look for a job requiring them – but I have in the past hired a service to clean up dog poop from my yard and it’s actually a fairly easy job and an enterprising teenager could probably earn a lot over the summer offering a once-a-week service of that nature to dog-owning neighbors. (Certainly not glamorous, but its just one of those things we pet owners have to do; we do get used to the idea.)</p>
<p>Everyone has different opinion on how long and how much they are willing to financially support their kids. Personally I think it’s a “miss” for kids not to hold some kind of paying job when they are young. Personally I think it’s a learning experience that bodes well over time. We happen not to give the kids spending money. If they want to go to the movies, or out to dinner or need gas for something other than getting to and from school , basically pocket money, they have to ask and we rarely say no, but they have to ask… We buy them clothes, shoes, sporting goods, pay for academic and sports related “stuff”, feed them etc. Sometime around age 16 all three have decided they would far rather have a job and not have to “ask” for money. Works for my H and I. We have noticed that our kids spend less than our friends kids who are funded. We’ll over hear the kids say “no I can’t go the Bdubs I’m broke.” It’s a self sufficiency thing that I dont’ know if we could have “taught” anyother way. My oldest has a very nice resume reflecting 6 years of real albeit minimum wage jobs, a couple internships and of course, next year he’ll have a degree to add to the mix. He knows how to go find a job and how to interview which I think are invaluable skills. Other people think that its equally fine for kids to gain those skills with degree in hand…it’s just different approaches for different families. </p>
<p>Finally, cutting the financial apron strings with regard to fun money seems an easier to do at 16 than taking away the credit card at 21 as some of my friends have to now do. It was a point of conversation this weekend as some good friends are struggling with their previously well funded daughter who just came home after graduation and is spending money hand over foot putting together an “interview wardrobe”, eating out with friends everynight, planning a summer trip and contemplating “moving” to NYC. Yikes.</p>
<p>One suggestion for kids who are having trouble looking for work the traditional way: turn a skill into a business. Most teenagers are good at something. And with the internet as a means for finding buyers for your talents, there is a lot of opportunity if you’re a bit resourceful.
Pet sitting, web design, photography, videography, painting, music lessons, tutoring, general child care–all are ways to make money and have some fun by doing things you enjoy anyway. A resourceful young person could turn any of these into a fairly lucrative business. My own son started designing websites when he was in high school, continued all through college, and has found it a great side business he can do from home or school, and he seems to always have a job or two going, and he’s found more than one client on Craigslist!
If pounding the pavement isn’t bringing success, maybe it’s time to develop a talent and market it. Sometimes I think our kids are unaware of what and how much they actually have to offer.</p>
<p>The state where I grew up looked down at volunteer work. I knew many hiring managers that felt that students who didn’t hold down part time jobs for pay in the summer would not be eligible for employment at their firm. Volunteer work didn’t count because the feeling was volunteer work didn’t have the same standards and accountibility as for-pay work.</p>
<p>Where I live now, volunteer work is very much appreciated and would probably be counted the same as for-pay work.</p>
I do believe that it’s important for kids to have work experience, especially minimally-paid hard-labor type of work… (think, collecting shopping carts from the grocery store parking lot in the 100 degree heat all summer long…) but I do think it is important to balance that, and to take a HARD look at what that money buys! If you take the “car, car insurance, gas, maintenance” out of the equation, maybe that student can get by with a 20-hour per week job and a chance to find some more varied and interesting or enriching summer opportunities. (And how about ride a bike to work! ;)</p>
<p>I never had this problem with my older two kids, nor with my 4th son, but my third one really had trouble finding any job for many years. He just was very ineffective, wasting a lot of times filling out apps blindly instead of targeting his best chances. I do worry about this as it is a skill that is ever so important when he gets out of school. He will have to support himself, and I just pray he learns to do so.</p>
<p>I have given him a lot of direction in job hunting, but he really is just not good at it right now. He got his job through sheer luck last year, and some intervention by his older brother. Work fell into his lap this year, and he will have 2 jobs, maybe if things work out, but not due to any ingenuity or extra effort on his part. He’s a great kid, wants to make the money, get the job, but is really having trouble with this.</p>
<p>^^I worry about that also. My oldest seemed to land his first job with very little effort and as we all know once you get the first one that parlays to the second, the third etc. he never seems to have trouble. I’m abit nervous what will happen next spring when he graduates from college. I’m secretly hoping that he lands post college jobs as easily as he has landed teen/college jobs. We’ll see. Finding a job is a skill and it’s silly to pretend otherwise. My third is struggling abit this summer but he’s young so I’m not too concerned. Number 2 was rather disfocused and it did take him about 5 months to nail one down, he was poor on follow-up and would wait for people to call him then get bummed when he would find out they hired someone who had walked in…</p>
<p>With regard to volunteering and regional differences: kids do some volunteer activities but it’s not generally considered to be a job. I’m sure as they mature they can spin volunteer efforts in some way to add value if they have a sparse work history. It’s also possible that there are regional differences in how young volunteers are utilized. If I had a college grad struggling to find a job I would definitely steer them toward volunteering in their particular skill area for the networking opportunities, for high school kids I think volunteering is different, more of an EC than a job.</p>
<p>“But In the above post the reference is to the job for 16, 17 or 18 years old that have no relevance to your field of study or intended career. These jobs are taken to just get spending money.”</p>
<p>Of course they are…aren’t ALL jobs taken just to get money?</p>
<p>Tell me, assuming that you work for a living, would you put in the 40 or 60 or 80 hours a week that most professionals do if you didn’t get a paycheck?</p>