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He is working way more than most research shows to be beneficial for High Schoolers trying to maintain grades. This is where parental guidance SHOULD step in.
I apologize if I wasn't clear before. I only teach seniors, and most of them are 18 like this particular student. Not really much a parent can do at that point.
What I find interesting is my very best and very worst students are most likely to have jobs with long hours. The A-/B students frequently have very low hours or no jobs at all.
I apologize if I wasn't clear before. I only teach seniors, and most of them are 18 like this particular student. Not really much a parent can do at that point.
What I find interesting is my very best and very worst students are most likely to have jobs with long hours. The A-/B students frequently have very low hours or no jobs at all.
I realized that. If he is living with them, parents can still step in.
Id not want to see a youth going to school working more than about 20 hours a week.
I realized that. If he is living with them, parents can still step in.
Id not want to see a youth going to school working more than about 20 hours a week.
When it was mentioned in a meeting recently that maybe he should cut back working, he told his mother that if she did that he would drop out, move out, and go to work full time. Just because they are legally adults doesn't make them mature.
At this point, we just want to get him graduated and hopefully going away to college will sort this out for itself.
When it was mentioned in a meeting recently that maybe he should cut back working, he told his mother that if she did that he would drop out, move out, and go to work full time. Just because they are legally adults doesn't make them mature.
At this point, we just want to get him graduated and hopefully going away to college will sort this out for itself.
If you'd cut the snark I'd be more inclined to share with you.
I'm about ready to say, well, I won't say it. Working did not make my kids keep their rooms any neater, if anything they were worse. If your daughter just got this job, at the end of the school year, no wonder it didn't affect her grades. Next fall will be the test. If she's saving every dime, who is paying for her clothes, her gas, her social outings?
I am still paying for her clothes, she just has a learners permit so she has to drive with me or her dad in the car. I pay for the gas. She has worked for a few months now. I still give her lunch money and pay for her social outings. I will continue to pay for all the thing I would pay if she wasn't working. We plan to have her pay her car insurance and gas once she gets her regular driver's permit. She mainly works the weekends so she still has time to do her homework each evening. She knows staying on the honor roll is more important that her job.
And please, what are you ready to say? She is my oldest and I can take in any advice you have to give.
That's not a "job," as I still never had enough freelance writing gigs to pay me a constant wage by any means. I had one regular gig that didn't pay much but it also was a lot of fun. I was a contributing editor for Suite 101 reviewing Hong Kong action films at a rate of one per week and I got paid $7.50 per article. I was watching the movies anyway, the reviews took me about 30 minutes, maybe 40, and I then had the copyright on the articles (they didn't own them) so I was able to redistribute my own work on ThemeStream soon after where I got paid per view and usually would earn an additional $5-25 per article, so it worked out ok per hour of actual writing if you ignore having to see the movies. Given I was a movie buff anyway, I didn't consider the movie viewing to be part of my "work" even though obviously it was necessary.
Encouraging a kid to work if they want a bunch of extra spending money for going out is totally normal and fine parenting as you can't just give a kid unlimited funds for no particular reason. Telling your kid to get a job to pay for gas to drive to school and buy clothes = terrible parenting. Most parents should never have kids and it's fully selfish behavior on their part. In today's day and age, if you have kids and don't plan to pay for their college, you're a pretty lousy parent. Very few people can succeed without a college degree and to strap your kid with college debt because you decided to have kids when you weren't financially able to do so, that's just lousy. My best friend in high school worked from 16 on so that he could buy clothes and pay for his lunches, which is ridiculous. His parents had 4 kids and couldn't pay for them, so because they couldn't figure out how to use birth control effectively or how to use their brains, he had to suffer. Until a kid is AT LEAST 18, it's your job as a parent to pay for ALL clothing that's reasonable and necessary, gas for going to school (or drive your kid, if you don't want to pay for gas, fine), all meals, etc. That's the minimum. Most parents who aren't total deadbeats are going to help their kids well into and through college.
If you think you're not severely handicapping a kid by making them work during high school, you're mistaken. There are better things to be doing with your summer than a minimum wage job. For one, most high school kids who are getting straight A's and doing extracurriculars are working a lot harder than you are. This is apparently something very tough for parents to understand, because they think they are doing "real work" and their kids are just kind of messing around or that high school / college is a REAL BLAST (newsflash: it sucks compared to working, where you actually choose what the heck you want to do and get paid for it!). It's like do you not remember school? My weeks were 30 to 35 hours of school, then another 25 hours of homework when I was fortunate, and in sophomore year, that was more like 35 to 40 hours of homework on top of the school. And it's not "just school" -- ANY job is WAY better than school, at least you get paid for your time!! So the least that you can do is let your kid relax and have some fun and actually enjoy their youth during the summer. Who knows, if you have a good kid, your kid spends summers writing a book, researching things of interest, working on physical fitness, etc. Not that there's anything wrong with a kid sitting around watching TV and swimming all summer. For god's sake I think 60-70 hour weeks for 9 months of the year earns you a 3 month vacation! Nobody in the work force works that hard, unless they're pulling down 6 figures and in that case it's a bit tough to feel sorry for them.
I feel like parents somehow act like kids today have to be occupied "doing" something at all hours of the day, but what that creates is wasted opportunities for creativity where you manage to fill their time with useless tasks. Do you know what you create when you insist your kid work a minimum wage job at every free moment? You create a pawn, you create someone who I cannot wait to hire because they're saddled with the same mediocre attitudes and behavior that you probably beat into them.
"Oh it teaches great values like listening to your boss, learning to work for other people, customer service, and doing meaningless chores for a paycheck!" Wow are you kidding me right now? That's what you want your kids to learn? Think outside the box! Those aren't values I ever learned and as a result I made dang well sure I never had to work for someone else. Instead, I had free time to learn about the world around me and not just be stuck in the moment of cleaning grease off the fry pan or flipping burgers or ringing someone up at the cashier's station. Don't try to tell me that minimum wage jobs are some big life lesson or add a ton of value to a young person's life. They don't. They are great for parents to say, "Oh you want money for the movies? GET A JOB!" Cool, you are parent of the year! NOT. Let your kids explore and learn about the world around them, let them have some time to themselves to figure out how they want to be part of things and pursue their own hopes and dreams. Working at Taco Bell because your parents are cheapskates who think making you pay for your own gas or want you to pay for absolutely everything that's not a necessity doesn't teach you anything except maybe that your parents should have saved more appropriately for having kids, that your parents don't appreciate the hard work you put into school.
I didn't have a job during college and as a result I took 20 and 24 credits per term and finished in 3 total years of school with straight A's until my last term (one B). That wouldn't be possible working a summer job. You would simply be way too burnt out. Summer is where I could mentally recover from the work I did during the school year and pursue my own self-actualization whether that was working out one summer with a trainer and growing strong and building life habits, hiking, reading every book Nietzsche wrote because my philosophy department didn't teach about him, and sometimes just sitting around enjoying the sun and hanging out with friends. Those are great memories. Those are memories that wouldn't exist if I was working all of the time. People who work lousy jobs have a mentality that doesn't lend itself to big picture thinking -- you're so focused on the here and now, the day to day grind, you can't step back and think about what your life goals and plans are and have a chance to explore what you may want to do with yourself.
My god, it's no wonder we have so many tools in society because they get these terrible attitudes from their parents who think they're really doing their kids a favor by being cheapskates. Let me know how that works out for you! I would love to see how many of these kids turn into entrepreneurs or artists or go against the societal grain whatsoever. I find that very unlikely, though, since their parents have already raised them to believe that depending on other people for a paycheck -- and a pathetic one, at that -- is the way to go to gain "responsibility" and "maturity." You can keep your maturity and responsibility and I'll take my innovative approach to the world, drive, discipline, and ability to think for myself outside the box. Those are things you can't teach by doing the same things everyone else does. Maybe your kid is smart enough to work a minimum wage job and think, "Wow, anyone who depends on an employer for a paycheck is at the whim of finding someone to pay for their labor, and that sometimes sucks," though I wouldn't count on your kid figuring that out themselves. But thanks for the cheap labor in the future, I appreciate it!
The kids who work minimum wage jobs during the summer are ultimately going to be overshadowed by the kids with either nicer or richer parents who paid for piano lessons, golf lessons, or who gave their kids an allowance and suggested their kids volunteer because it looks nice on a college application, or whatever else. Nobody, especially not colleges, cares about your kid working Burger King one summer. So why would that be something you want to emphasize as a great parenting decision? If that's the reality is your kid needs to work a job to pay for going to see Avengers 2, fine, that's what happens, not every family has the money to help their kids out. But just don't make it sound like it's some smart, noble parenting move, at least have the courage to admit, "Yeah, I am broke, and I make my kids work lousy pointless jobs because I really couldn't afford to have kids in the first place but here we are." You are starting your kids at a massive disadvantage if they don't have the opportunities to do more meaningful pursuits than manual labor and fast food services.
That's exactly what I'm doing as well. I'm currently an aspiring entrepreneur online marketer (making at least few hundred a month so far, but trying to scale everyday). Kudos to those that works 9 to 5 jobs or what not, but that isn't my goal in life. I'm 24 as well.
Private information as I am close with his older sister who graduated 10 years ago.
He works for over 30 hours a week, no longer participates in any extra curricular activities, etc. so to be clear, this particular student is spending as much time at work as at school As a teacher for well over 10 years I am familiar with "senioritis" and can differentiate between the two. Nearly all seniors get some version of senioritis, especially as beach weather approaches. This is not the same thing. For one thing, the decline coincides with either the job or an increase in hours spent at the job. Finally, he admits that the job is preventing him from both doing extracurriculars he enjoys and getting his work in.
Thirty hours for school, 35 for work, 60 for sleep leaves 40-45 hours to be budgeted. Maybe "recreation", not work, is taking him away from his studies.
That's actually an epidemic in this country
amongst the 20 something yr olds.
Laziness- using the excuse they're in school....
Gee how long can they prolong the free rides? :think
okay, uh, source.
I mean from the data I've seen the employment rate for 25 year olds hasn't recovered from the recession. .and its still high. Yet this spike in unemployment/underemployment is right in line with the recession and the recent college graduate rates just hasn't equalized as others.
To say that "kids today" are responsible seems pretty weak conclusion.
I started working pretty steady at 15, then worked FT and went to college at 17.5. It was a tough road but my parents had no money. I lived on my own from the age of 18 as well.
My son is 16 and my daughter is 14. They are both in honors studies, active in really good clubs and do a lot of civic service, so I'm not inclined to encourage that they have to work at this point. If one chooses to get a PT time job, then it's really open to family discussion to weigh out the pros and cons.
I'd rather provide my kids the opportunity to take advantage of their educational options (class credit for college credit, robotics and engineering clubs) etc. It's something my wife and I couldn't do and often wish we could have.
I am somewhat encouraging my son to work for the Forest Service part time this summer. They have great student intern (paid) programs in areas such as noxious weed control, habitat restoration, trail restoration etc. Working outdoors in Montana during the summers is a really great experience given all the wild places we are adorned with. Sure is a lot better than flipping burgers or waiting tables (at least it is for an outdoor family like us..)
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