A little more than 16 years ago, my wife gave birth to a critter named Michael Patrick Jones. He emerged backwards that day thanks to some not uncommon complications with the delivery. Much to my lovely wife’s chagrin, the first thing the attending physician said was: “Look at the size of those feet!”
Today, he wears size 13 shoes (for a week or so before he outgrows them). He’s a high school sophomore. He’s 6 foot 3 inches tall (about 3 feet taller than me, thanks to the steroids administered during preschool). He’s a stud athlete and a pretty decent student. Girls flock around our house like white on rice. His Facebook page receives more visits than anything I’ve ever done on the Internet. He would sleep until 2011 if allowed to. He’s never had any real chores at home, and we spoil him shamelessly.
|
|
Yet, I hope to help him find a summer job at a local golf course next year because I believe – perhaps stupidly – it will teach him responsibility and instill a decent work ethic in him. I view it as kind of a boot camp for real life. The problem is that he has so many obligations for football training, track training, SAT pretesting and, of course, his all-important social time, that an actual job might interfere with his “real” life.
My question to you, dear reader, is whether this is typical of attempting to employ teenagers in this day and age. Are they even employable given “helicopter” parents who hover over them constantly and the fake priorities of their lives compared to the simpler times when we grew up?
Help me understand this: Is the practice of employing healthy, suburban teenagers dead at American golf courses?
Click here now to go to our forum and let me know. GCI