So its been awhile! This won't be very long as I only have half an hour before I have to get ready for work. Yay? What a long week this is. Work sunday monday tuesday wednesday thursday friday and something tells me I'll be getting called in saturday and sunday as well. Too bad! Not gonna happen ;). But this brings up exactly what I wanted to talk about. Parents. Parents are great! They buy you things and keep you warm and dry and feed you and apparently assume you're superhuman. No, for real. If you are a parent I want you to read this as I'm directing this to you. Perhaps in your day, balancing high school and a part time job was easier. Part time job meant a few hours on the weekend or maybe a couple hours after school once or twice a week. Not to mention your school curriculum in grade 12 is now what we learn in grade 5. Believe me when I say things have changed. If you're like my parents you expect part time to mean 25-30 hours a week which roughly translates to this: wake up, go to school, get home, sit down for three minutes, go to work, get home around 10-11pm do homework until 1am and repeat. Then the dreaded weekend comes around and we are expected to work saturday and sunday. So now not only are we basically going non stop 24 hours a day 5 days a week but we don't even get a day off on the weekend. The law says workers must legally get one day off per 6 days worked. That's a person working 40 hours a week. How about students working (I include school and homework in this) from 7:00 in the morning to 1:00am monday to friday and 9-5 saturday and sunday. You then get surprised when we skip a few days of school to sleep or book a few weeks off work to get caught up. Thank god I'm not doing that anymore!
Here's my suggestion for you parents. Don't nag your kid to get a job after school. Recognize school for what it is. A full time job. One that not only takes up 6 or 7 hours of their day but also 2-3 hours of their evening as well. It's a 9 hour a day job and you want to add another 3-5 hours a night of actual work on top of that? Fine, you do that. But I challenge you to do the same. Go out and find yourself a student type part time job that takes up your entire evening and weekend on top of your normal full time job and you'll STILL come out on top because you won't have to come home at night and spend your last waking hours doing homework. See how fast you burn out. Contrary to popular belief teenagers are not robots meant to work 24/7. They burn out, fast. They require more sleep then you do and quite simply don't get it.
That's all. Rant over. But I can hear it now. "What you're saying is that I should just let my child be lazy and they won't learn work ethic blah blah blah". Not at all, that is what school is for. That is what homework is for. It teaches responsibility and time management and that is where you as a parent come in. Teach your own damn kids work ethic. And don't think that your 16 year old child should be working their fingers to the bone and contribute to the household because they owe you nothing. You brought them into this world and they are your responsibility until they turn 18. Even then, if you care at all about their future you'll let them focus on school because in the end all a teenager sees is that going to work gets them money and going to school becomes a pain in the ass so they'll stop going! Smarten up parents, you aren't doing your kids a favour by making them work to the point of a breakdown.
-Chris
