For those that started working before age 16, how did you do it? (tips, teenager)

[goodlife36]

I don't recall what came first. I did baby sitting. I worked for summer youth when I was 13. When I was 14, I worked at high school over the summer. At 16, I was a census worker.

[fisheye]

I sold fish worms at eight. I officially started working a summer job caddying at 12. Then, at 14, I went into hotel maintenance during the summer.

[Yeledaf]

I started in the summer of age 14 as a percher in the textile mill where my parents worked. (A percher sat on a "perch" high up in the rafters, and inspected the cloth as it slowly rolled up and over the looms, and marked flaws with a red grease pen).

I earned a dollar an hour. My take-home pay was $36.00 a week.

When I asked my dad years later why he had made me take such a rotten job, he told me it was to teach me never to do factory work, but instead study hard, go to college, and use my brains to make a living.

[Mr. In-Between]

I got my first job at 13, as a cleanup kid at a sports arena. They had some sort of program for hiring kids for summer jobs. $1.35 an hour, 20 hours a week.... man, I thought I was Rockefeller when I opened that first check!

[curiousgeorge5]

Paper route. Other jobs on the side.

[redguitar77111]

I worked at a summer camp when I was 15, 16, and 17. It had closed down by the time I turned 18.

[Zen88]

My brother, age 14, got a paper route. I was 12, but looked older, so we split the route. I got my own route when I was 14. My customers also paid me to wax cars, mow lawns, rake leaves, and shovel snow. Additionally, during the summer I worked as a helper to the custodians at the elementary school that I had previously gone to, during the summers of 86, 87, and 88. I don't remember what year of age you could get working papers in NYS. In the fall of 88, I got a job at a retail store. Finally graduated high school in 89, and worked full time in the store until beginning my career at a local utility in 1990. I'm now thinking about things that happened in those early years, and it seems like so long ago, yet I can picture in my mind places and people that are long gone and dead.

[calnbs]

Another thing, to make additional money, in middle school, my brother and I use to flip candies and gums. We would go to 7-11 stores and load up on their cheap gums and candies for 3 cents & 5 cents and we would take it to school and resell them for 25 cents. It wasn't much money but when you grow up poor, money is money.

During some summers, my friends and I went along with some adult family members to Oregan to pick berries. That was hard work...picking berries.

[601halfdozen0theother]

Detasseling seed corn in the late summers - I think I was 13?? It was the summer before 8th grade. I'll bet a lot of Midwesterners will give this answer. Agricultural work had a lower age limit than other kinds of work at that time - don't know if it still does. I know there were kids younger than I was. The older kids drove the machines while the younger kids rode the side arms and detasseled, or walked the fields and detasseled. It was REALLY hard and hot work, but fun, too.

I also babysat, which I absolutely HATED.

I did some volunteer work at that age, too - candystriper at the hospital (which I also hated), and general scut work at the local museum (which I loved.)

[Frostnip]

Farm work. I started when I was 13. It was legal at that time, not sure whether it would be now.