Manual Labor for Teens
August 29th, 2009
This summer my daughter was fortunate to apprentice with a friend of mine, an interior designer and architect. When she came home at the end of her first day, I found her prostrate on my bed.
“How did it go?” I asked.
“Manual labor,” she moaned. “Manual labor.”
My 15-year-old daughter, who my architect friend said carried a drill as though it were a purse, had spent the day staple-gunning fabric to chairs, hot-glueing fringes to ottomans, and pulling out with pliers crooked upholstery tacks off a sofa.
In the days that followed, she went on to install curtains, make lamp shades, and help create light fixtures—an experience that probably taught her more about problem solving than those supposedly college-resume enhancing summer internships my fellow blogger Catherine Arnst wrote about and for which parents paid fees of up to $9,500. My daughter’s two weeks as an apprentice helped make this “the best summer of my life,” she said.
I remembered this as I read “Deskbound, Romancing the Brick,” the recent article on The New York Times about “recession-pummeled Americans indulging in a romance with blue-collar trades, while also questioning the hollowness of white-collar work.”
I don’t know whether the current nostalgia for working with one’s hands will result in a lasting shift in how people value blue-collar vs. white-collar jobs. But this I can say: Working in a trade benefits teens far more than an office job does.
Just think about it. Manual labor uses up all that energy teens seem to have in abundance. And the kids immediately can see the fruits of their labor—be it a well-swept garden or a lamp that actually lights up—so there isn’t the problem of delayed gratification. For both those reasons, manual labor is a great mood enhancer for teens.
My daughter’s experience was made richer by the fact that she found herself in a true apprenticeship situation: She not only worked at the elbows of more experienced workers but she also helped prepare and ate meals with them. The effect was magical. It didn’t take more than a few days before she began referring to “our clients” and “our billings.”
I know that summer jobs for teens, already scarce, have become scarcer in this recession—which is a shame, because their benefits are manifold. Next year, as I help my daughter find summer work, I’ll make sure that it again will involve a lot of elbow grease.
What summer jobs do you think are best for teens?
Related posts:
Posted in Working Parents