I know I worked like a motherfucker as a kid.
The truth, however, is more or less the opposite. If you look into the history of successful people, you’ll find that a huge percentage of them worked as children. They picked weeds in the corn fields, or at least in the garden; they had to sweep shop floors, mop the office, clean the barn, or be a second mom to the smaller children. This is necessary for children: If they don’t start learning responsibility during childhood, they may flee from it all their lives, diminishing themselves in the process, and making themselves easy prey to every politician with a promise of free stuff.
Children need to learn that they can do hard things. They need to learn that difficulty is part of life, and that they won’t be spared from it by complaining well enough. They need to know that they can and do produce.
I might expound on this once I get home, but a lot of the kids I work with DON'T KNOW HOW TO WORK. Or they didn't know how to work until life gave them several unpleasant lessons, and even then they struggled to learn how to work. By making a kid's life easy, you're setting them up for failure after they leave the house.
Which is part of the reason so many of them don't leave the house.
2 comments:
I started babysitting at age 11, mowing lawns around the same time. Then at 14 I was washing dishes for a restaurant that my parents bought later, for 50 cents an hour. At 16, it was hauling hay, working the strawberry fields and asparagus fields. Then a canning factory and finally a gas station until graduation from high school, and then at 18 years and 3 months, it was a foundry for over 35 years.
I learned my work ethic from my mom, who always worked outside the home. I got my character from my dad, but I would walk down and watch my mom and the other women in the crate mill nailing pallets by hand. I would watch for hours, at the age of about 9-10. I was fascinated by how they would work together on opposite sides of their table, building pallets for the fruit industry here in west Michigan.
It was because of my early life and my work history that enabled me to work as a blue collar worker, even though I had the potential to do anything I wanted. Of course, the steel melt shop that I worked in was actually a high end steel melt factory that made high quality alloys for the investment cast industry and the aerospace and medical industries. So it was high tech, requiring more than just a strong back. But the work was still hot, heavy, and often dangerous. Not every person who walked in the door could manage to do that type of work.
It was funny, because when someone was hired in, I could tell within just a few minutes of talking to them, if they would be a good fit for that type of work, or not. Yet human resources, better known as personnel, had no clue that the guy could work in a shop environment or not.
I worked my ass off as a kid. Splitting wood, bucking bales, pulling weeds, mowing lawns... Anything I could do to earn a buck.
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