Why Can’t I Work?
Arnold was sitting at his desk, trying to keep his mind on accounting, but having little success. He was tired of studying for exams, and he kept daydreaming about having money to do whatever he wanted. It seemed he never had enough. He imagined himself winning a sweepstakes and having money to buy a car, a boat, a house—and still have lots left over.
Across the campus Penny was lying on her bed, trying to learn physiology. She too had trouble keeping her mind on her studies. She imagined what it would be like when she was a surgeon. She thought about herself examining patients, operating on them, and presenting the findings of her research to other doctors.
What do adolescents daydream about most? We already mentioned that 96% or 97% reported daydreaming about sex. Only two other topics ranked higher in the percentage of students reporting daydreams. In that same study 100% of the college men reported daydreaming about “vocational success” and 100% about “money or possessions.” Among college women, 98% daydreamed about vocational success and 97% about money or possessions (Laurance Shaffer and Edward Shoben, The Psychology of Adjustment, Houghton Mifflin). Work, money, and sex were the top three.
Why do adolescents daydream about work and money? For the same reason they daydream about sex. They cannot have it.
Although we say we want independence for everyone, we keep adolescents economically dependent. We do not allow them to work, so they do not have their own money. Money gives us power over adolescents, and many teenagers do not like being kept in this state of dependence. It was not this way until the invention of adolescence a century ago.
Before Adolescence
For thousands of years children worked with and learned a trade from their parents. It seemed only natural that parents should teach their children about work or apprentice them to someone who could teach a different trade. Children worked with their parents in field or factory. They worked beside a master as an apprentice for several years until they could produce their own masterpiece and become independent.
During the seventeenth century in the United States, Puritan boys worked, and at about fourteen their fathers chose callings for them. In the eighteenth century Benjamin Franklin wrote that he was taken from school at ten years of age to help in the family business. When he was twelve, his father signed the indenture for him to serve as an apprentice until he was twenty-one.
In the nineteenth century Massachusetts required that no state money be used “for the support of any male person, over the age of twelve, and under the age of sixty years, while of competent health to labor” (Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1823). People over twelve were expected to support themselves. In 1900, nearly two-thirds of the men between fourteen and nineteen years old were working. By 1940, only about a third were. What brought about this dramatic change?
It’s the Law!
In the nineteenth century a constant labor shortage resulted in children being employed everywhere. In fact, in 1834, 40% of the factory workers in New England were children. In 1842, two states passed laws limiting the hours children could work. Soon a half dozen states prohibited children under ten or twelve from working in factories.
Child labor continued to increase until about 1900. People who cared about children, people who wanted to keep wages up, and people who wanted more efficient labor persuaded legislators to pass the child labor laws. However, rather than just making forced labor illegal, legislators make all labor illegal for children. People could begin to work at about the age of puberty. That is, when the laws were passed, they distinguished children from adults. Children could not work, but adults could.
Unfortunately, as the age of puberty decreased, the minimum legal age for work increased. Currently all but five states require special permission to work under a given age. That age is eighteen in twenty-four states, seventeen in three states, sixteen in seventeen states, and fifteen in one state. We now have a situation in which some adults (adolescents), not just children, are prevented from working.
We often hear about the terrible effects of unemployment on people. We are told that it damages the human spirit, that it leads to depression, and that it leads to low self-esteem. Laws meant to protect children now force unemployment on these new adults (adolescents). As the National Commission on Youth (The Transition of Youth to Adulthood: A Bridge Too Long, Westview Press, p. 14) put it, “Youth are now isolated, restrained, and eventually victimized by the very institutions designed for their protection.”
Yet another set of laws also helps keep many adolescents from working. In 1930 Congress passed a federal minimum wage law covering about five out of ten workers and setting the wage at $0.25 an hour. Today it covers more than nine out of ten workers and is $3.35 an hour.
Although legislators intended these laws to protect workers, their effect was to price adolescents out of the labor market. Employers found it cheaper to automate or to manufacture things in other countries where people would work for less. The National Commission on Youth recommended paying lower wages to youth getting training and experience in apprenticeship and internship programs. If adolescents produce less than other adults, they should be paid less.
Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You
When teenagers look for work, they often hear, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” Adolescents have great difficulty finding permanent work. In addition to the ways discussed above, several other things have happened in our culture to make unemployment a way of life for them.
For thousands of years people were paid for what they did. Cobblers were paid for each pair of shoes. Blacksmiths were paid for each horse shod. Farmers were paid for the produce they brought to market. People who produced more were paid more. On October 28, 1779, George Washington wrote about visiting a factory where people had to work from eight to six, but “they are paid by the piece, or work they do.”
On May 1, 1913, Henry Ford changed the way he made generators for his car. Instead of giving each worker twenty-nine parts to make a generator, he gave twenty-nine workers in a line one part each to add to the growing generator. A little later he powered the line. This invention of the assembly line reduced the time needed to make a generator from twenty minutes to five minutes. Within a year he assembled whole cars this way.
The assembly line was much more efficient, but people could not be paid individually for the work they did because the line moved at a given speed. The workers had to be paid for working a given amount of time rather than for what they produced. Since some people work too hard under piecework conditions, labor unions campaigned for the hourly wage everywhere. Today, nearly everyone is paid for being present an hour rather than for actual work done.
Employers have to pay inexperienced, low-producing adolescents the same as experienced, high-producing older workers. Employers want people who can produce, so adolescents are the last hired and first fired. Adolescents often hear, “Come back when you get some experience.”
They say, “How can we get experience if no one will hire us?” They have a good point, but the hourly wage as a basis for pay means that employers will hire them only as a last resort. Employers also set requirements for jobs, requirements that do not make much sense. For example, many unnecessarily require a high school diploma. A high school diploma today does not even mean that one can read and write. The main thing such a requirement does is to keep anyone under eighteen from getting a job, even if state law says they can work after age sixteen.
What can people do at twenty-one or at eighteen that they cannot do at fourteen or sixteen? Not much, if anything. As we saw in the first chapter, people are adults physically and mentally long before they graduate from high school. Are adolescents inherently less responsible than older persons? No, teenagers were in the work force a century ago. Why keep them from working now?
Although we hear much about age discrimination, it does not usually include adolescents. “Age discrimination” usually means discrimination against people forty to seventy years of age, not those twelve to twenty. Adolescent unemployment has been with us as long as we have had adolescence. Ever since the 1940s when the labor department began keeping unemployment statistics for teenagers, the adolescent unemployment rate has been three to five times as large as that of other adults.
Even these statistics do not reveal the extent of the problem. They do not include the adolescents who would be looking for work if they thought they could find it. Three out of four employers do not want to hire people under twenty-one for regular full-time positions. What an introduction to the world of work! Our culture has switched from child labor to young adult unemployment as a way of life.
Legislation has not reduced adolescent unemployment. Congress has created various youth corps and job corps with little lasting effect. The unemployment rate among white sixteen-to-nineteen-year-olds is about the same as in the 1940s, and among blacks it is two or three times as high. Unemployment is a part of adolescence in our culture.
I’ll Find Something to Do!
In hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in 1955, Senator Alexander Wiley said, “To me when I see the youth of this country in idleness, walking the streets of the cities, [I feel] we are meeting a challenge to our common sense because we know idleness breeds not only crime but everything else.” Not expected to work and not allowed to work, adolescents often find something to do and wind up breaking the law.
Laws have distinguished between children and adults for thousands of years based on the “age of responsibility.” Under English common law 800 years ago, children under seven could not commit crimes and those under fourteen could not be punished unless someone could show that they could distinguish right from wrong, intended to do wrong, and understood the consequences of what they did. People over fourteen were treated as adults.
Juvenile delinquency, a part of our creation of adolescence, was officially invented with the passage of the Juvenile Court Act by the Illinois legislature in 1899. In that act a “delinquent child” was defined as “any child under the age of 16 years who violates the law of this State or any City or Village ordinance.” Of course, at that time (1899) sixteen was about the age at which boys passed through puberty. This law created separate proceedings for children and adults.
Other states soon followed, and the juvenile justice system was seen as great progress. Juvenile courts were to reform, not punish; to uplift, not degrade; to develop, not crush; and to make worthy citizens, not criminals. On October 5, 1905, when Pennsylvania’s Justice Brown ruled its act constitutional, he sounded almost religious when he said it was “for the salvation of children.” It was “the way by which the state undertakes to save…all children under a certain age, whose salvation may become the duty of the state.”
As with other parts of adolescence, as the age of puberty went down, the age of adulthood went up. By 1968 people were treated as children legally until they were eighteen or twenty-one. That year the Uniform Juvenile Court Act was written and approved by the American Bar Association. In it a “child” was a person who was “(1) under the age of 18 years; or (2) under the age of 21 years who committed an act of delinquency before reaching the age of 18 years.”
That is, people would legally remain children for three extra years if they committed a delinquent act before they turned eighteen. A “delinquent act” was one “designated as a crime under the law.” A “delinquent child” was one “who has committed a delinquent act and is in need of treatment or rehabilitation.” These definitions made it clear that people were not expected to take responsibility for their actions until they were eighteen or twenty-one.
Just as teenagers have not been expected to take responsibility for supporting themselves, they have not been held responsible for their criminal acts. Their actions have not been considered crimes. People have seen delinquents as being in need of treatment, not punishment. For thousands of years teenagers were treated legally as responsible adults, but today we treat them as children.
One problem has been that we have made serious crimes rather insignificant. Other adults have long felt that teenagers could “get away with murder.” That used to be just an expression, but since the invention of adolescence, it has often become literally true. With the invention of juvenile delinquency, teenagers could commit what would be serious crimes if they were adults, but they would be sent home, not to prison.
In 1980 the National Commission on Youth noted that youth arrests for violent crime (murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault) were climbing nearly twice as fast as for all crime. The most arrested group in the nation was eighteen-year-olds, second was seventeen-year-olds, then nineteen-year-olds, followed by sixteen-year-olds (The Transition of Youth to Adulthood: A Bridge Too Long, National Commission on Youth, Westview Press).
One California delinquent in a training school complained, “I was sent here on a bum rap.” The bum rap was not that he was innocent of the robbery, but that “the judge sent me here on the third offence, instead of waiting until the fifth.”
As a Minneapolis social worker put it, “If you want to get locked up, run away from home. If you want to be returned home, commit a burglary.” She was right. More than four out of five charged with incorrigibility were held, while only about half of those charged with burglary were.
Another problem was just the opposite. We created “crimes” that only adolescents could commit. By about 1960 “delinquency” carried a stigma, so we invented “status offenses” for adolescents “in need of supervision.” Instead of delinquents, they became PINS, CHINS, MINS, or JINS (persons, children, minors, or juveniles “in need of supervision”).
Adolescents can be taken into custody for doing things other adults can do with no penalty. Other adults cannot commit such crimes as trying to get married or leaving home without permission. About a third of the arrests of adolescents are for crimes that would not be wrong if they were a little older. FBI reports show that 100% of the arrests for curfew, 1oitering, and runaways are for people under eighteen—since people eighteen and older cannot commit these “crimes.” This is another clear case of age discrimination.
The juvenile justice system has been a failure. In 1967, the President’s Crime Commission reported that the great hopes originally held for the juvenile court system had not been realized. It had “not succeeded significantly in rehabilitating delinquent youth, in reducing or even stemming the tide of delinquency.” The Joint Commission of Juvenile Justice Standards said that a system that “allows the same sanctions for parental defiance as for armed robbery…can only be seen as inept and unfair.”
Many states now question the idea of not expecting responsible behavior from adolescents. Nine states have no age limit, and most states have laws saying that serious offenders fourteen to sixteen years of age can be tried as adults. Vermont recently lowered its age of accountability to ten. We may be seeing the demise of the juvenile justice system, and that is not all bad. Our laws should make a distinction between children and adults, but not turn adults into children.
What Can Parents Do?
Since the law prevents many teenagers from working and fails to hold them fully responsible for criminal acts, it may seem that parents can do little to solve these problems. However, parents can do much to help their adolescents learn responsibility.
Find work? Adolescents should learn how to work by having real work at home. They need to care for their rooms, help at mealtimes and help with everyday tasks that need to be done around the house. Lawn mowing, painting, and cleaning are adult work, and teenagers should be involved. In our family, parents and teenagers plan and prepare Sunday dinner on alternate weeks. Our three teenagers take turns planning the menu and being in charge of cooking the meal with the others helping. If they forget, we all eat sandwiches.
However, most teenagers are also able to find some kind of part-time work. Our teenagers mow lawns, rake leaves, shovel snow, and baby-sit. Some teens start their own businesses, such as growing vegetables or worms. As parents you should encourage such things. You should also help adolescents avoid some of the commercial ventures, such as envelope stuffing at home, designed to take money from people, not help them earn money.
If possible, help them find work with someone who appreciates what they do. As our teens mowed lawns, it made a real difference whether or not they felt they were doing a service. Some of their customers were grateful, glad to have someone mow the lawn. This made them feel needed, since they were really helping people, not just earning money.
Teens can be a real help and learn much through volunteer work. When our daughter Cheryl was a candy striper at the University of Kentucky Medical Center, she learned about everything from meeting people to helping people to dealing with bureaucratic red tape. She learned how to work with professionals and patients. She was of service, and what she learned was more valuable than many courses she took in school.
Help your teenagers prepare a resume. They will need it to apply for work and scholarships. If they begin it when they become adolescents and keep it up as they move on through high school it will be of great value. Our teens learned this through doing record books for 4-H. When it came time to apply to college and for work, all the information was there in usable form.
Teach about work. You need to work with your adolescents as well as assign them work. They learn by example much better than by hearing what they should do. Instead of just sending them out to weed the garden, weed it with them. Paint the house with them. In the past, teenagers learned about work from their parents, and they should still form their attitudes toward work by watching their parents. What you say about your work will profoundly affect how your teens view work. Too often they learn from other adolescents who know little about work themselves.
You need to teach them about things associated with work as well. Teach them to get things done on time. Workers who do not meet deadlines have trouble keeping their jobs. In our culture workers must be able to get out of bed in the morning and make it to their workplaces on time. Parents who take responsibility for getting their teenagers up in the morning and pushing them out the door to catch the school bus are setting them up for problems in the future. Teens can have their own alarms and be responsible for getting up, dressed, and ready for the bus on time.
In a sense, school is an adolescent’s work, and their grades evaluate how well they work. Some parents pay their children and adolescents for grades. I don’t advocate that because they will soon start learning for the money, and when the money stops, they will stop learning. As one major league baseball player put it, “I used to enjoy playing ball until I started getting paid for it.” Adolescents need to be held responsible for their performance in school. Some of their work later will be much like their work in school.
Teach them whatever skills you have. If you know something about car repair, teach it to you adolescents. If you know word processing, teach it to them. The computer on which I am writing this manuscript sits in the family room, and our teens see me working on it daily. All three of our teenagers could type and do word processing before they got to high school simply because it was a part of our life.
Finally, since the state keeps adolescents economically dependent, you have a responsibility to provide for them in the case of your death. In times past other members of your family would probably have taken over responsibility for your dependents. Today the state takes over. You should have a will and a trust set up in which you name a guardian for your adolescents. If you do not, and something happens to you, the state will decide who takes care of them during their crucial teenage years—and the state may not choose the guardian you would choose.
Hold them responsible. Since your juvenile justice laws seem to have things backward, it is up to you to straighten them out as far as your teens are concerned. Take action to prevent your adolescents from becoming involved in criminal behavior and hold them responsible if they do.
To start with, you can see that they do not have too much idle time. If they are not involved in school activities, they should take more responsibility around the house or perhaps work part-time. Wandering the streets too often leads to trouble and it certainly does not teach responsibility. Confront them when you see them getting involved with the wrong people.
Expect responsible behavior from adolescents, just as you do from other adults. Remember that people act the way you expect them to. If you expect teenagers to act irresponsibly, they will. On the other hand, if you expect them to act as responsible adults, they will. Tell them that as long as they act responsibly, you will treat them as adults. Of course, if they act like children, treat them as such.
Whether or not our society holds our adolescents responsible, God does. Just because our culture does not punish adolescents for breaking its laws does not mean that God will not hold them responsible for breaking His. You must make sure that they understand that He may not hold them responsible for breaking their culture’s rules, but He will for breaking His commands. He may not punish them for standing on a corner after ten o’clock, but He will for stealing.
As parents, we may be too protective of our adolescents. As one mother put it, “If I don’t stick up for him, who will?” We must hold them responsible for wrong behavior even if the government lets them off. They may get off with a warning for hurting someone or stealing, but we should see that they make restitution for what they have done. Our society has gone too far in “protecting” them when they do something wrong.
We must make distinctions between ignorance of the law, harmless fun, and deliberate criminal acts. If they were not intentionally doing something wrong, we need to stick up for them, but if they knew they were doing wrong, they should be punished. They should also realize that you will hold them responsible for whatever the group they are with does.
When you do something wrong, they should see you apologize and make restitution. You need to be a model, not only in doing right, but in righting wrongs. Help them to realize that they can hurt people psychologically as well as physically and that those hurts need to be corrected too.
As in other areas, we need to treat our adolescents as adults in the area of work and crime. Even if our culture does not hold them responsible, as parents we need to do so.
(Chapter 9)
2005 Update
A few things have changed relative to work. Due to inflation, the Federal Minimum Wage is now $5.15 per hour. Also, more adolescents now work part-time jobs than was the case twenty years ago. A first some people expressed concern that the work would have a negative impact on the adolescents, particularly their performance in school. However, most research shows that some work, but not too much, actually has a positive impact and improves their performance in school. Up to about ten hours per week is beneficial, but more than that (particularly more than fifteen hours a week) is likely to lead to poorer performance in school and an increase in dropouts.
More states have been trying adolescents as adults over the years for particularly heinous crimes. However, in February 2005 the United States Supreme court ruled (on a split decision) that capital punishment cannot be given to anyone under the age of eighteen at the time of the crime. So those who were on death row have now had their sentences changed to life imprisonment.