Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire After school and summer jobs for teens

With all the Progressive propaganda that it seems the kids have embraced on college campuses these days, it makes you wonder how they can embrace that foolish, dead end philosophy? That also made me look at how many kids don't work after school and in the summer as teens these days.

One strange trend is that around these parts, the suburban kids are in no hurry to get their Driver's License or Learners Permit. I will tell you I was there on my birthday when I was a teen. No license = no wheels = no job or dates. Around here, 15 year olds are content to have the parents chauffeur them around. It's not like these families can't spring for a cheap used car for the kids. I will admit, traffic is extraordinarily heavy as our metro area expands like Jabba the Hut in a doughnut shop, and that can be intimidating.

That got me wondering about work. Youth sports are 12 month/year deals these days. If your kid shows promise, they are training all year long. Football starts here in July and runs until Nov/Dec. They have Winter weight training and conditioning, they have May Spring training for 3 weeks on the field. June they have 7 on 7 passing camps.

Basketball is year around. School in the winter, AAU the rest of the year. Baseball starts throwing in December, the season here has already started for high school and that runs to May. May begins Travel ball that runs until school starts August 1. Then there is Fall ball.

So many of the kids are tied up with endless sports, they don't have time to work.

What about employers? Do they have menial jobs that teens can take and and enter the work force? All this "living wage" bullcrap has made casual labor expensive. Nobody expects people to live on $7/Hr, but that would be a start for teen, IF it were legal. Paying a kid $10-12/Hr for entry level work now makes employers pause before hiring somebody "to help out around here".

Point I'm getting at is asking - have too many kids failed to learn a work ethic, had that responsibility and duty to show up everyday, on time and ready to work? Has this led to the pampered entitled mentality now seen on college campuses where they think they can defeat any idea they don't like by shouting it down?

Try shouting down the landlord when you can't pay the rent, or the grocery store when the EBT card runs low?

Maybe I've got it wrong, but I certainly think if this bunch had been collecting some sort of paycheck for work before they went to college, they'd be more realistic and less idealistic. Maybe I'm just another "old dude" who doesn't get it. What I got at their age was highway construction, pumping concrete, refurbishing floor jacks and hand set concrete forms, and waiting tables. Then I got wise and went to baseball umpires school and made more money n less hours and had fun doing it. That was my first lesson in upward mobility. Gain a valuable skill, make more money. All that served me well in college. 8 am Organic Chemistry was much preferable to 6:30 a.m. running the jack hammer in the middle of I-85.

Anyone else see the trend?

This country is gonna have a whole lot of qualified gas station attendants in the next 5-10 years.

Dave

If even that. Most of them wouldn't even know how to make change against a ten dollar bill. Sad!

Parents in 2017 tend to think every little Johnny is going to end up playing college ball and then onto the NFL. Of course there have always been a couple sets of parents like this in each class through the years, but now they seem to be the rule and not the exception.

This country is gonna have a whole lot of qualified gas station attendants in the next 5-10 years.



Dave

JFC, ain't that the truth. My son and my buddy's son got cut from the all-star baseball team last week, after try-outs. The reactions couldn't have been different by the 2 boys or the 2 dads.

Jeff and his son... (son) "I'm done with baseball. That team is going to suck anyway." (jeff) "I'm pulling my son from this league. I need my money back."

He called the coaches and said his son is better than 15 of the 22 kids picked. Jeff also called the coach and berated him for 15 minuets. I did witness this. Jeff is a great friend, but I was truly embarrassed by his reaction.

Me and jack... (jack) "Dad, we are going to have a bad ass American League team. There were a lot of good kids cut." (Me) "Are you mad you got cut?" (jack) "Yep. They'll pay. I'm going to hit 10 jacks and showed them they missed... but look at our team. We're going to be bad ass. Can you call the coach and see what I need to work on?"

I did call the coach. He said he needs work on getting behind ground balls instead of stabbing a glove at them.

The neighbor across the street is a prime example. Their teenage girl plays softball and yes she is good. She will probably wind up with some kind of scholarship. Crap, the money they will have spent on softballin 8-10yrs they will probably had been able to send here to any college she wanted to go. They spend every weekend somewhere playing ball. When I say somewhere, I don't mean local. They go to florida, Vegas ..... I don't know how they do it. They are not wealthy by any means.

The real question is, where are the colleges getting money to offer scholarships for softball/volleyball/soccer/baseball/etc??? Football is probably the only sport (maybe basketball) at some colleges that generates any real revenue. I doubt any of them generate anything at D-II schools.

When I was about about 12, a very wise teenager around 17 told me you needed a car to be able to get pussy. He said do all you could to get one when you turn legal at 16 so you would have a way to take girls on dates. By the time I was 16 I had 2500.00. Bought a truck, got first pussy soon after.