parents, Harvard called, and scooping shit is not a pre-req for becoming a heart surgeon!!

It seems that parents really value making sure their children "learn the value of hard work", "learn to appreciate the value of $1", and "learn to work hard for their money". This traditionally results in the parents helping the child, or even forcing the child, to begin working the following infamous jobs from, in some cases, age 10 or younger, up through 18, and even recommending the then legal adult continue such labor through their college years:

- landscaping

- janitor (car dealership, YMCA, etc.)

- garbage collecting

- flipping hamburgers

- fecal scooping

- construction

- lawn mowing

I am going to reveal a partial list of jobs I held from age 10 through 18:

- neighborhood landscaping (I found my services volunteered t0 neighbors at 10 years old)

- barbershop maintenance (sweeping hair, changing bulbs, cleaning toilets)

- bailing hay (stacked em' 9 high!)

- residential construction site clean-up (collecting fragments of sheet rock)

- snow shoveling / removal (from commercial rooftops and storefronts)

- tanning salon bed maintenance (cleaning the beds after regular 20 minute tans)

- pallet breakdown / workplace maintenance (tractor / farm equipment dealer)

- car dealership repair shop maintenance (cleaned the bays after mechanics fixed cars)

- used oil filter crushing & disposal 

- bus boy / waiting tables / dish washing

- office trash removal 

- Christmas tree trimming (out-of-season)

- retail store greeting / customer service (basic retail clothing store position)

- professional / crew landscaping (laying sod, digging ditches, etc.)

- bar backing

And the list goes on...

Now, the motivator to get and keep these jobs, in most cases, initially, is to teach the child (I use that word to represent a dependent younger than 18 years of age) "how to earn money", or what you have to do to "earn money", i.e. "work". Want to buy that new comic book? Work for it. Want gas money? Get a job kid. Right? Parents love that shit! We've all heard it. But the incentive usually morphs into a negative reward system versus the initial opposite, where as we start to grow and mature and challenge the shit we are doing for $5.15 / hour, we are told "this is what you will be doing if you don't go to college", or, in other words, "don't go to college, and this is what you can look forward to doing forever".

Initial lesson: "if you do X (shovel poop), you get Y (money for ice cream)"

Final lesson: "if you don't do Z (go to college), you get to X (shovel poop) forever" 

For the sake of my argument, I am going to say that parents ultimately want their children to fear the consequences of not going to college more than they want them to shovel dog poop as the mechanism to learn the value of $1. I believe they initially desire to instill solid "hard-working fundamentals" in their children, but leverage the fear of a shitty life when their children start complaining about the poop shoveling efforts to insure the children will want to go to college. 

Now, if that is the case, why do parents feel their children need to spend 8 years of their free-time in jobs that suck before the parents feel their children will, with absolute certainty, want to go to college, or will want to avoid what they've been doing the past 8 years? Do parents believe their children do not have the ability to empathize? Do you have to actually perform "X", or, say, clean Wal-Mart toilets, before you know that you will do "Z", go to college, to avoid "X"? Really Mom and Dad? I have to log the "man, when I was a kid, I had to..." sagas in order to learn I don't want to clean Wal-Mart toilets for a living and instead be a physician? 

I think it's bullshit. Don't agree? I read a statistic that a majority of college-graduates don't even end up in a field relevant to their "major". Think about that. People rush into school out of fear; they don't even know what they actually want to do; they just know they don't want to scoop shit. They choose whatever major, and you know it's not well aligned with their self-interests and talents because they take jobs doing things that have no relationship to their majors!

But they dodged that shit-scooping bullet baby! Mission accomplished!

My proposal to parents is to spend less time scaring your kids into going to college and putting that proverbial feather in your cap and more time helping them learn what their talents are, decide what they are interested in, and understanding what they can do while their friends are scraping gum off pool tables to begin working toward maximizing their contribution to society. Lead them toward their dreams versus scaring them with nightmares. Walking to school, in the snow, uphill, both ways, didn't do anything for me but piss me the fuck off and allow me to play a card during conversations about competing for "who ate the most shit as a kid" trophy (which I have yet to have with lawyers, doctors, and hedge fund managers...).