If, on a sunny day, your small children open a lemonade stand, do you charge them for the lemons pilfered from your kitchen? Of course not? What kind of a scrooge do I take you for?
OK. Fair enough. So you clean up their sugary mess, having paid for the ingredients, while the children dance around chortling about all the money they’ve made.
It’s a taste of entrepreneurialism, you think. Who knows where it may lead? Perhaps Bill Gates once sold homemade lemonade, and look at him now.
But what about when children are not so small? When they are teenagers embarking on their first genuine business ventures, or taking their first official jobs, it is harder to know how much intervention (and subsidy) is appropriate. Should we ride them about punctuality, make them pay their own bus fares and nag them about looming deadlines?
And if we don’t, and they screw up, whose fault is it?
Ah, you say. That’s simple. If the child is old enough to take a job, he’s old enough to do it right. But it isn’t that simple, not in an affluent era when a creeping slacker entitlement mentality has taken hold even in pioneer-style, can-do households.
Life for our children is vastly more easeful than it was for us; as, indeed, were our childhoods compared with the rigorous ones undergone by our parents, and theirs to the grueling walking-to-school-through-five-miles-of-driving-snow experiences of our grandparents.
There’s something lovely about each generation of Americans bequeathing ever-more-comfortable circumstances to those who follow — but there’s something corrosive, as well.
All around, you see parents doing for their able-bodied children what the children could do for themselves, whether packing lunchboxes, petitioning teachers to get grades raised or lugging a child’s sports equipment, while the kid himself walks freely, swinging his arms and calling to his friends.
So the summer job question is not so straightforward. Parents today are in the habit of shouldering their children’s burdens, even into adulthood. And children are accustomed to being bailed out.
Two contradictory difficulties apply in the case of teenagers. These proto-adults naturally yearn to be taken seriously. They can only learn responsibility if they are actually given it — with the risk of embarrassment and failure that goes along with it.
Yet at the same time, teenagers are … young. Even the most urbane youth is relatively inexperienced in the ways of the working world. If parents leave them to founder or succeed, well, they’ll do one or the other; perhaps both, over time. Is it fair suddenly to let them sink, when we’ve been buoying them up since lemonade-stand days?
As summer job season approaches, I know I’m not the only parent grappling with these tormenting questions.
In two days’ time, our eldest and her friend are starting their first summer business, running the snack bar at a neighborhood swimming pool.
You will not be surprised to hear that rather a lot of organization, and some financial investment, is required to set up such a thing — or that both teenagers feel coolly capable of handling things, yet keep spacing on what they’re supposed to do.
Neither seems to notice the four quivering pairs of adult shoulders upon which they stand. Nor do they know how many helpful “suggestions” their parents are biting back; or how many fretful e-mails are flying as we adults worry about the still-unordered ice cream, the still-undecided opening hours, and how on earth to get to Costco, again?
Ideally, this summer the children will develop shrewd commercial instincts, enjoy the morale-boosting effects of hard work and learn (at last!) the value of a dollar.
The darker possibility of which we adults are acutely aware is that instead they may spend long, glassy-eyed hours trapped in a sweltering hut, eat — literally — into minimal profits (there’s no salary), and have to fight off ravenous hordes of lifeguards.
We are thrilled and impressed that our teenaged children have the gumption to run a business — we’re also gnawing our knuckles with apprehension. For anti-slacker, nonentitlement, Life Lesson purposes, we’re trying to stay out of it. But it is hard.
