I later learned that this summer job programme was instituted by the government in the 80s as part of a larger social scheme to bring down youth crime/vandalism, youth drinking/substance abuse and the like, by giving them something to do and paying them generously. another part of the scheme was curfews for kids - by keeping them at home at night there was less opportunity for them to get into trouble. I never thought it was weird there was a nation wide curfew for kids under 18 until I left the country and people looked at me funny if I mentioned it! anyway the scheme worked, all the bad statistics plummeted and the good ones soared.
I really like the sound of that Icelandic initiative. As long as it's not exploitative, and there are safeguards in place, it's a good idea, and it obviously worked. In my experience, teenagers will behave in a responsible way if they are treated reasonably and given responsibilities, but this has to start early on.
so if a teenager doesn't have a job it can be a bit like, oh so your child is lazy? your child doesn't want to work? your child is setting themselves up for failure, it'll be so much harder for them to get a part time job once they're of age if they don't get one now! so there's a lot of social pressure on kids to have a job.
This was exactly the same thing in Australia — all the same reasons, although a lot of the social pressure came from other kids, where it was like, 'you're so childish, I can't believe you want to keep getting pocket money from your parents rather than earning it yourself by working.'
I hear you on the lack of downtime, though. By the time I left secondary school, I was going to two piano lessons a week, twelve hours a week gymnastics training, volunteering at Amnesty International, working all day Saturday at my job, practicing piano for an hour every morning before school, and going on overnight hikes three or four times a year for the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme, plus of course school and a whole lot of homework. My social life was basically ... doing all these things with various overlapping groups of my fellow teenagers, and although I was so busy and driven and focused on all this stuff that the usual kinds of teenage angst and social/psychological misery completely passed me by, once I got to university and this packed schedule evaporated, I was completely incapable of forming social connections and building a social life without a similar kind of structured, timetabled existence!
I love that you worked in a bakery as well, although it sounds like it was run by much nicer people than the one I worked in. (I went on to work for about three months in an Italian bakery where the owners and chefs were dealing drugs out of the kitchen, and then — after six months on a big supermarket checkout — got a job in a small, family-owned chocolate shop/patisserie, where I stayed for five years; bakeries are a bit of a theme in my early working life.)
It was really interesting to learn about all the typical jobs in your area — very different to what was possible in the big cities where I lived!
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I really like the sound of that Icelandic initiative. As long as it's not exploitative, and there are safeguards in place, it's a good idea, and it obviously worked. In my experience, teenagers will behave in a responsible way if they are treated reasonably and given responsibilities, but this has to start early on.
so if a teenager doesn't have a job it can be a bit like, oh so your child is lazy? your child doesn't want to work? your child is setting themselves up for failure, it'll be so much harder for them to get a part time job once they're of age if they don't get one now! so there's a lot of social pressure on kids to have a job.
This was exactly the same thing in Australia — all the same reasons, although a lot of the social pressure came from other kids, where it was like, 'you're so childish, I can't believe you want to keep getting pocket money from your parents rather than earning it yourself by working.'
I hear you on the lack of downtime, though. By the time I left secondary school, I was going to two piano lessons a week, twelve hours a week gymnastics training, volunteering at Amnesty International, working all day Saturday at my job, practicing piano for an hour every morning before school, and going on overnight hikes three or four times a year for the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme, plus of course school and a whole lot of homework. My social life was basically ... doing all these things with various overlapping groups of my fellow teenagers, and although I was so busy and driven and focused on all this stuff that the usual kinds of teenage angst and social/psychological misery completely passed me by, once I got to university and this packed schedule evaporated, I was completely incapable of forming social connections and building a social life without a similar kind of structured, timetabled existence!
I love that you worked in a bakery as well, although it sounds like it was run by much nicer people than the one I worked in. (I went on to work for about three months in an Italian bakery where the owners and chefs were dealing drugs out of the kitchen, and then — after six months on a big supermarket checkout — got a job in a small, family-owned chocolate shop/patisserie, where I stayed for five years; bakeries are a bit of a theme in my early working life.)
It was really interesting to learn about all the typical jobs in your area — very different to what was possible in the big cities where I lived!