Your Advice?
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
I have a few students currently who are on this track. It is painful to see, especially since I was raised to be self-reliant.
My brother, on the other hand, more resembles the above example – how two sons get raised by the same people in such diametrically opposed ways is one of the great mysteries of the universe…
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What piques my skepticism about this post is that the author is not identifiable as a mother or a father, evinces too precise and self-critical an understanding of how they got from there to here, and makes no reference to either social isolation or the mental health trade. If [s]he wasn’t pushing him to find work, being the only one in his social circle without a job would have induced him to do so. If he had a social circle. I’ve seen situations like this and the availability of unearned income, passive family members, clueless family members, social isolation, and ineffectual mental health tradesman were all elements. The situation which improved if incompletely did so when the out-of-ideas shrink arranged for a meeting between the youth in question and a counselor at the state office of vocational rehabilitation who evaluated him and put him in touch with a social work agency which could help him map a pathway out of his personal morass and coach him along the way.
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Some decades ago early in my sobriety, my 2nd AA sponsor had an 18 year old daughter who was using and abusing illegal drugs. He kicked her out of the house. Period.
Deuteronomy 21:18-21
18 If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father and mother, who does not heed them when they discipline him, 19 then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his town at the gate of that place. 20 They shall say to the elders of his town, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” 21 Then all the men of the town shall stone him to death. So you shall purge the evil from your midst; and all Israel will hear, and be afraid.
I had an interesting, and related, discussion with my father-in-law yesterday.
We were talking about how different our experiences were growing up, and how bad they are becoming for generations to come.
He got his first job at 7 or so working in his dad’s Dry Cleaning business, then working on farms doing things like picking rye out of wheat, and finally getting his first real job in a grocery store at 16. Mind you, he’s a white boy who spent his entire life in Eastern Washington!
I didn’t get my first regular job til I was 21. Not for lack of effort.
For all the thousands of applications I put out, stomping the pavement and whatnot,
nothing panned out. The military was unfortunately not an option.
I had my first 2 job interviews of my life in the span of one week and got rejected both from Target and McDonalds.
Later that same week after the sketchiest job application ever (only reason I knew it was legit was that it was directly linked from the National Park Service), I received a job offer to work in Yellowstone. No interview, just a packet with job details.
When I was told not to take the Yellowstone offer and that I should just keep reapplying for McDonalds; I bought a one-way plate ticket and left for Yellowstone in Wyoming instead.
Best bad Idea I ever had.
Washington State in the modern era makes it difficult or impossible for people under 18 to get any job due to safety regulations; to the point that in most restaurants literally the only thing you can do if you are under 18 is run the cash register.
Here in Idaho, I’m pretty sure it’s 14 for most non-industrial work. You can work in a factory at 16 (not running heavy machinery of course).
One thing we’ve both seen in people coming into the job pipeline is that they often greatly stunted and have poor work ethic.
Part of it is bad parenting.
A lot of it is the system, especially in the blue states that functionally won’t let you do anything until you are 18. They enact excessive safety regulations, set sky-high “living” wages for even the simplest entry-level jobs, and set other rules sharply limiting the times and hours you can work.
Then they wonder why unemployment and crime are so high, and why the younger generations are so poorly adjusted. Or why a guy at 33 has no incentive to do anything with his life in this case.
Steve-
I completely agree about the child labor laws.
No, I don’t want to see little Tommy in the chicken processing plant instead of going to school, but the laws are overprotective to the point of allowing next to no job experience before having to decide “what you want to do with your life.”
The laws are also obviously written by dim politicians whose kids wouldn’t work anyway. Under 17, among the few jobs available are child care and lifeguard(!) but you are prohibited from most jobs with power tools. In short, have sole responsibility for toddlers in a pool but a power drill is just a bridge too far!!
I wouldn’t throw him out per se. I’d apologize first, then explain that he’s got four months left at the house. Then I’d become a parent. 7am wakeup calls, how-to’s, teaching about finances, daily exercises.
IMO, schools should be in session 240 days a year, but the pace of instruction assumed by state regents examinations should incorporate the calculation that high school students have wage employment. Age 14 is an apposite time to begin wading into the labor force and truancy laws should not apply to those over age 14. Those between 10 and 14 could be permitted to work p/t for proprietorships, partnerships, and close corporations owned by their proximate relatives. A rebalancing of manpower between academic courses and voTech courses among high school students might also be beneficial.
If taken at face value, then it looks like the kiddo in question is definitely abusing the situation. With that said, I was talking to a woman from Florida last week and mentioned the way we did our kids. Basically we let them stay at home while they pursued whatever their goals, be it college, trade school, or whatever. That cut down on expenses. We did charge them a stipend, they were expected to continue helping about the house when available, take care of their own living expenses (auto, personal, etc.), and were also to be actively working toward their respective goals. So far it has worked, with two graduated and the third starting school and not a brass farthing of college debt between them. The woman I spoke to said she was seeing that sort of thing more and more, with parents letting their kids live in similar situations, and not just while they are going to school. That fits what we’ve noticed in our neck of the woods, where rent can be 500 a month for an abandoned crack house, and exponentially higher beyond that.