Hard work and responsibility just aren’t what they used to be. The liberal culture of participation awards and safe spaces is creating a generation of coddled young adults who are entitled, apathetic, and unwilling to toil and labor for a better future. But there is a way parents can turn the tide and instill a strong work ethic in their children: encourage them to get summer jobs.
As Dee Ann Turner, Vice President of Enterprise and Social Responsibility for Chick-fil-A, writes, “Summer and part-time jobs are not just a rite of passage. They are the earliest steps into a lifetime of self-sufficiency and career fulfillment.”
Turner shares:
One of my sons had a challenging first year of college. He struggled to find his place and his focus. Trying to think of ways to help him gain motivation, I remembered that I knew someone when I was in college who had similar challenges who found a job roofing for the summer. One summer on hot roofs nailing in shingles and he was ready to buckle down and get serious about college the next semester.
Eager for her son to learn the “same hard work and responsibility,” she encouraged him to get a job over the summer. He found one cleaning pools. “Our son rose before dawn and worked until dark six days a week through a hot Georgia summer,” Turner writes. And while the job taught Turner’s son “the skills of properly maintaining a pool,” he also “learned so much more”:
Ultimately, our son used his experience at a summer job cleaning pools to develop more responsibility in his character and strengthen his relationship-building skills with customers, co-workers and his boss. These were vital lessons that helped him in the classroom and all the steps along the way to his career.
In addition, the hard work encouraged him to be more serious about his studies, recognizing that the achievement of future dreams was dependent on his focus and discipline in the classroom.
Summer and after-school jobs teach young people valuable life and career skills they may not otherwise learn sitting in a classroom. The responsibility of showing up on time to a job and the accountability of meeting professional goals and expectations outlined by a boss is very different from the responsibility of finishing homework on time or studying for a test. Having a job also teaches young people money management skills that they won’t acquire from school alone. Furthermore, being paid for a learned skill fosters increased self-confidence, which promotes drive and self-confidence in other areas of life.
Summer is just around the corner. Rather than allow your children or grandchildren to spend all their time mindlessly playing video games or lounging around doing nothing productive, encourage them to get a part-time job. They may complain about it now, but it will benefit them immeasurably in the long run.
Source: Fox News
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