Get a Job

We have talked lately about Lucas getting a job, and I realized in the process that there is something that was really, really different when I was younger.  Lucas, and you could say the same about Jarrod, has in a very real sense never worked a day in his life.  In the very real sense that, at the age of 17, he has never been paid by someone outside of me or Jackie for anything.  As far as we can think, not one hour of babysitting, no yard work, no watching someone's pets or watching their house, literally nothing ever. 

And while this has not seemed so odd on a day-to-day basis, in retrospect it's pretty strange.  I was never the most industrious kid (trust me, really), but by the time I was his age, I had babysat, watched houses and pets, had a paper route, and was working Saturdays cleaning a machine shop.  A lot of those things just sort of happened, part of being a teenager.  People asked you to do stuff. 

So how did we come to this?  One thing I suspect is that the culture has just changed, similar to the way that kids don't play outside like they used to, or how people who live on the same street don't talk to each other.  That Jackie and I don't know our neighbors well probably is part of it at least.  The relative isolation of homeschooling, particularly from people who live really close, hasn’t helped.  Lucas doesn’t have it quite as easy as I did, because he has to actually look for work if he wants it.  He has applied for a couple of things but didn’t get them. 

The thing that surprises me though is his attitude toward the idea.  He doesn’t have any interest and says that having a job doesn’t sound very fun.  Now that second part he gets from me, because my job wasn’t fun the last few years, but I did keep getting up and going.  But again going back to my own experience as a kid, I don’t think it ever occurred to me that I could just not work because Mom and Dad would pay for everything.  I wasn’t always thrilled to go off babysitting, but I did it anyway if I could.  And I liked having some money. 

Just to pile on a bit, in this year, this rebuilding financial year, the year that I have been unemployed and will be again a week from Monday, we have spent a bunch of money on Lucas.  We bought him a car.  We took him to an archery tournament in Boston and another in Ohio that was combined with a driving trip to Oklahoma and as far as UT Austin for a campus tour.  We also ordered new archery equipment for him – really expensive archery equipment.  And most of all, we are offering to send him to universities next year, some of them very pricey.

OK, about now I have to point out that I don’t blame Lucas at all.  This is more about my failings as a parent and my genuine surprise that things are at this point.  Really, how does a kid get to be 17 and not want to make money?  I have always taken the attitude that I wanted my boys to have the chance to be kids, to not always have a lot of responsibilities, because the day will come, and decade after decade will come, when they have responsibilities all the time.  I wanted them to have some fun.  Maybe I overdid it.  And that's "I" by the way, not “we,” because Jackie has always had a tougher attitude. 

I also think that I have been lax about this because I look at the big picture, and in the big picture, there are critical things I want to see from my boys, and Lucas is pretty great about those things.  His main job as a kid is to lay the groundwork for becoming a productive adult, and he’s done that well.  He is an excellent student, and although his mother was a big part of that, a lot of the credit goes to him.  He has always been responsible.  He has stuck with activities like Boy Scouts and archery for years, making it easier for us to commit to them.  Right now he gets up at 6:00 or so every morning and uses that car we got him to go to college classes.  One quarter he was getting up at 5:00 and taking the bus.  He even hasn’t been too much trouble as a teenager.  Hard to beat that. 

Anyway, learning how to do a job is part of your education, like learning to swim or ride a bike.  He might even like making money.