by Ron Lieber
Still, isn’t an admissions officer at the college of our children’s dreams going to wonder why the kid picked paid work over captaining the debate team or picking up a second team sport? According to Joie Jager-Hyman, a former assistant director of admissions at Dartmouth College who is now a private consultant for college applicants, high school seniors who don’t need the money they earn from paid work do indeed have a high bar to clear with many of the people who read their applications. “You need national recognition in some area,” she said, ticking off athletics, academics, or charity work as likely sources. The colleges want us to believe this too; when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put out a news release in late 2013 about its early-admission acceptances, it proudly noted that more than one-third of the incoming students had won some kind of national or international honor.
These sorts of accolades are technically possible in the world of work. There are national barista champions and plenty of competitions for teenage entrepreneurs. Then again, so many of us have promised ourselves that we would avoid spending 15 years of our parenting lives following the prescribed paths that college admissions experts urge us onto. Recognition is nice, but work experience that imparts essential character traits matters plenty.
What our kids can learn from paid employment is a work ethic, that loose phrase that captures the ability to listen, exert ourselves, cooperate with others, do our best, and stick to a task until we’ve done it, and done it right. Or we could just call it “grit,” a term that University of Pennsylvania professor Angela Duckworth has helped popularize in recent years. To her, grit is the answer to this question: Why do some people accomplish more than others who are just as smart as they are? “Grit,” she and a colleague wrote in a short essay that appeared in 2013, “is distinguished from the general tendency to be reliable, self-controlled, orderly, and industrious, with its emphasis on long-term stamina rather than short-term intensity.” By developing tests of grit, Duckworth has been able to prove that high grit scores predict superior performance on everything from national spelling bees to retention at West Point. It’s more predictive, in fact, than IQ tests.
In short, it sounds like just the thing that a part-time job doing relatively menial tasks can teach. And Duckworth fantasizes about putting her own preteen daughters to work. “I would break the law to get my kids a paid job right now,” she said. “Where their boss is not their mom. Someone who doesn’t give a shit, and you just have to show up and perform.” It is not a coincidence, she believes, that all the psychology graduate students who have ended up working at her grit lab at Penn got their first jobs at or below the legal working age.
Better Chores, More of Them, and Sooner
Working at a job before you’re of legal age is a bit extreme, even if it may land you in a prestigious Penn lab. So start the job in the home, where we can help our kids act on what Stanford psychologist William Damon describes as a drive for competence. “They avidly seek real responsibility and are gratified when adults give it to them,” he wrote in Greater Expectations, his book about how far our expectations for our children have sunk in recent decades. Indeed, in many urban and suburban families, the chores that we assign them don’t add up to much. It’s all too easy to default to the assumption that it’s more trouble to teach kids how to perform more complicated household tasks than it is to just do them ourselves, indefinitely. In doing so, however, we send a clear, strong message, according to Damon: We expect little of you, and you’re living mostly for yourself.
Every couple of months, someone sends me a link to a particular list of appropriate chores for children of different ages. The chart originates with the Montessori school movement, where children use tools at younger ages than most others do and choose activities that the teachers refer to as work. The chart suggests that 2-and 3-year-olds can carry firewood, that 6-and 7-year-olds should empty the dishwasher, and that 12-year-olds ought to do the grocery shopping. Invariably, the sender includes a note with some version of the general message: If only!
My response is, “Well, why not you? And why not food?” We parents are all in the business of supplying 21 meals a week, plus snacks, so food preparation is probably the biggest household task there is. In late 2013, my family was transfixed by Sarah Lane, a 9-year-old girl who advanced to the final rounds of the reality show MasterChef Junior, cooking Beef Wellington and other complicated dishes along the way. She was the youngest contestant, yet it was obvious that she’d been handling knives and cooking over flames for years. Who raised this child? I wondered.
A few calls to the Fox television network yielded the answer: Stephanie Lane, a single mom in Los Angeles, who filled me in on the backstory. Sarah had spent much of her young life in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where her grandmother owned a restaurant at which Stephanie worked as a waitress. So Sarah had grown up around food; she was wielding a vegetable peeler by age 4. The knives came a year or two later and still make Stephanie a bit nervous. “I will often turn my head,” she said, laughing. “But I think there are people who live happy and full lives with nine fingers or fewer, so I’m not that concerned.” Sarah knows how to make her mother coffee in the mornings too, and Stephanie certainly doesn’t want that to stop.
In Japan, schoolchildren Sarah’s age and younger serve and clean up lunch themselves each day. The English translation for the daily ritual is “honorable mealtime,” which is meant to convey the seriousness of what might otherwise be a mundane routine. Teachers leave the room at an appointed hour, and the day’s designated students don chef’s whites and head to the school kitchen. They return carrying giant pots of stew and rice, and they serve their fellow students and lug the empties back to the kitchen.
The scene transfixed T. R. Reid, who wrote a book about the years that he and his wife and children spent living in Japan. “It was an adorable thing to watch, all these tiny creatures, 6, 8, 10 years old, dishing up lunch from tall iron pots in their playtime chef’s clothing,” he wrote. “Except this wasn’t playtime. The school wanted lunch, and it was the students’ responsibility to see that it was served.” His daughters attended Japanese schools, and one of them told her classmates that in the United States, grown-ups are paid to serve the children meals and clean up after them. Nobody believed her. In national surveys, 75 percent of Japanese children cite working hard as a top priority; 25 percent of American kids do.
Getting our own children to do more, and earlier, in the way of preparing, cooking, and cleaning up after meals isn’t easy. It takes practice and persistence, in the same way we may need to hover over them during the first months of music lessons as they whine and complain when things don’t come out quite right. Still, failure should not be an option. Every child is capable of contributing to meals in a significant way, and we shouldn’t need to pay them to set the table, boil the pasta, or clean it up. It’s not as if we lack leverage: We control dessert, first and foremost. But playdates, screen time, and car privileges are all tools we can use if our kids need more than a gentle nudge to finish their regular work around the house and in the kitchen.
What We Can Learn from Farm Families
When children grow up in a family that owns a business, they’re likely to start working earlier than kids who have to find strangers to hire them. The labor laws are often less strict when you’re working for your own family, as well. Families that literally live on top of their businesses are more likely than most to put their kids to work, due to simple proximity. And within that category, farms offer more opportunities to work than nearly any other business. This is doubly true for dairy farms, where cows need milking and manure needs shoveling on a daily basis.
So one autumn Saturday morning, I drove north from Salt Lake City to Lewiston, Utah, just south of the Idaho border. There, Jackson and Oralie Smith and their seven sons raise 1,800 cows. The boys range in age from 6 to 19, and over the years, their parents have developed a keen sense of the kind of work kids can do and how much of it. Zeb, their 6
-year-old, started working at age 5. He washes the nipples for the bottles that the calves drink from and steers the tractor as it creeps up and down the rows of their pens. The next oldest boys participate in or supervise the feedings, while others stack and move giant bales of straw and hay around the property. The older boys also participate in the 4:00 a.m. scraping of the corrals, a euphemism for pushing manure into its proper place and disposing of it. “It sucks,” said Zeb, who is old enough to tag along with his older brothers (and mimic their vocabulary) but young enough to take a nap in church on days that he’s worked in the morning. The brothers work six days a week, either at the crack of dawn or for two hours after school.
The boys earn no money for keeping their rooms clean or clearing the table. But when it comes to farm work, their parents pay them because they figure that collectively, they do the work of one full-time employee. So each boy gets a proper paper paycheck, which the younger ones often deposit in person at the Lewiston State Bank. They cash it sometimes too and once walked out with a pile of $2 bills. “I do have friends who make them do the work for free, and then they tell their kids that they’ll pay for their school clothes and gas,” Oralie said. “But some of them ran into situations where the kids begin to resent it.”
Starting in sixth grade, the Smith boys make all their own purchasing decisions after a 10 percent tithe to the Mormon church. They receive no money from their parents other than the $500 or so a month they’re earning by then. (Zeb started off with a $10 check every two weeks at the age of 5.) While their parents help them make lists of the sorts of school clothes they need, they make their own decisions about what they actually buy from Wrangler. If they want a $160 pair of cowboy boots, they need to figure out how to economize elsewhere.
Their paychecks cover the things they need. In the Wants category, they get a .22 rifle for Christmas at age 12, and at 16 they usually get a shotgun. Still, they swap and sell older items among themselves; Zeb just got his first BB gun and was happily waving it around on the day I visited, trying to shoot the birds that can spread disease to the cows. The boys also buy their own vehicles once they’re old enough and purchase horses to train and resell later.
The boys don’t have a lot of time for extracurricular activities. One or another of them is usually in the Boy Scouts or wrestling. If so, they’ll do their farm work late in the day. But football tryouts come and go without them: The daily practices would cut into their work and interfere with family horseback riding and camping trips at the end of the summer. “We can’t put the boys in anything that requires a lot of running around,” Oralie said. But she is by no means apologizing. “I have my own ways of teaching them teamwork,” she added. “In our town, it’s known that, if our boys come, it’s going to get done. We move furniture, load hay for the guy whose wife got hurt, and stain decks. They know how to work.”
The Smith dairy farm is an oversize operation in almost every way: more cows, more smells, more kids, more activity. But to me the biggest lesson comes from the smallest family member, Zeb. There is a presumption that he will work, that his family members will teach him how, and that he will be good at it, quickly. And while none of the boys is a great scholar or star athlete, their parents operate under the assumption that the ability to perform basic labor is something within every child’s grasp. They know that not every boy will grow up to work in the family business, but they’re confident that none of them will be afraid of the effort it takes to succeed someplace else.
Facilitating Work: Jet Skis, Suburban Hillbillies, and the Quest for a Horse
Cultivating a work ethic in their children as the Smith family does is not easy for families who don’t have paid work readily available. So it may take some extra parental effort to create or supervise such meaningful work or to transport kids to it.
When Len Scarpinato’s son, Mark, was in his early teens, Len bought the cheapest house on one of the nicest lakes outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Instead of hiring a contractor to fix it up, however, he hired his son. Len is a fix-it guy himself and had taught his son the basics of Sheetrock, painting, demolition, and landscaping. At the lake house, Len would start bigger projects alongside Mark to make sure he understood the task at hand and then leave him on his own to see it through, though he was always a short ride away if his son needed guidance. The payment was a bit more than minimum wage, and it came in the form of “Lake Dollars” that Mark could redeem for all the toys a teenager might want at a lake house. Mark quickly became an expert on used Jet Skis, snowmobiles, and their assorted accessories.
Mark transferred the discipline he learned in improving his construction skills to his work on the football field and in the weight room. Midway through high school, he heard about older teammates who were going to attend college for free, thanks to athletic scholarships. When his parents offered to use their college savings for graduate school if he could earn an undergraduate athletic scholarship, he didn’t just train harder. He spent hundreds of dollars of his own money on a consultant to help package himself better. On January 1, 2014, he helped anchor the Michigan State defense, and he and his teammates won the Rose Bowl.
There is no end to the potential costs for youth sports, and some parents reach their limit sooner than others. Mark Scarpinato chipped in for his college scholarship consultant, but he was lucky enough to have fallen in love with a sport that did not involve expensive travel teams.
His story contrasts with that of 14-year-old Cali Drouillard, whose parents could never cover all the expenses she runs up pursuing what may be the most expensive sport of all: showing horses. Her mother, Andrea, works as a sales manager; her father suffers from multiple sclerosis and cannot work. Giving up the sport and her goal to own a horse is a theoretical option, but the experiences will help her meet her goal of pursuing a career in the veterinary sciences. She has her eye on an undergraduate program in that field at Oklahoma State, even though she comes from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Cali has a friend who jokes that she’s the only country girl in the Detroit suburbs and refers to her as the Bloomfield hillbilly.
But a hillbilly in the suburbs needs earning power, especially if her family is not among the wealthiest in an otherwise affluent community. The Drouillards do not live in one of the more expensive neighborhoods. They make their mortgage payments without too much trouble, but they could never afford the $50,000 initiation fee at the fanciest riding facility in the area. Cali rides at an open-to-all farm nearby, and she’s fine with that. Still, her sport requires the use of a large, live animal, and her goal to have her own horse comes with an especially long list of costs. So her quest began with knowing every one of them, starting with what a horse needs to eat each week. She’s listed each item on a spreadsheet. First, there’s the $2,500 to $5,000 to buy the type of horse she wants. Then there’s the horse’s basic room and board, which doesn’t include medicine or visits to the veterinarian. Saddles, bridles, and horseshoes come next. That’s before the lessons start, and there are additional costs if she wants to travel with the horse to competitions. Cali can tick them all off from memory now, and she haunts various Facebook pages where used equipment goes up for sale.
As Cali grew increasingly fond of the sport, the bills added up. “I told her she could raise chickens or turkey or livestock,” Andrea said. “But I couldn’t continue to be her sugar mama.” Having issued the challenge, Andrea eventually had to decide how far she was willing to go, literally, to help her daughter respond to it. Not long after, Cali spoke to a friend whose uncle had a farm with 1,000 head of cattle a few hours north of where Cali lives. The friend had cut a deal with her uncle, who allowed her to help raise a steer in exchange for a portion of the sale price. She offered to get Cali in on the deal and Andrea quickly traded in her car for a Chevy Volt with sky-high mileage so she could ferry Cali up to the farm.
The logistics proved too complicated, however, so Cali started babysitting, pet sitting, and putting away any and all birthday and Christmas presents
to put toward her sport. “I need the money for paying my mom back,” she explained. “Up until this year, I hadn’t understood how much it cost to ride horses. Now I think of this as kind of a game. The more time I put in, the more money I end up getting. I love raising animals, and it’s what I want to do for the rest of my life.”
Families that can pay for every athletic pursuit, no matter the cost, shouldn’t let their kids off easy either. Joline Godfrey, the consultant who works with wealthy families, encourages them to ask their kids to take on extra chores. Older kids might tackle the planning, for instance: tracking the swim practice and meet schedule, sending weekly memos to the parent who does the driving, booking the hotel rooms, and creating family itineraries for when the soccer travel team goes on the road. “If you’re withholding all that responsibility, kids get all the privileges with none of the opportunity to build capacity,” she said. “And that’s what we’re talking about here, building capacity for children.”
They Can Pay for Some of College, Too
Michael Winerip and his wife, Sandy Keenan, worried about their children’s capacity for hard work. Their four kids grew up with more advantages than they had had themselves. And while the pair, who live on Long Island and are journalist colleagues of mine, were willing to pay for most college expenses, they wanted to teach their kids to find a job and stick to it. So they settled on a plan, a stretch target for each of their kids: Every one of them would pay for the first semester of college tuition themselves. To do this, they would need as much as $15,000 each. “The idea of having them pay for a semester isn’t the big thought,” explained Winerip. “It’s implanting a work ethic at a very young age that’s crucial.”