I think as a society we've come quite far, but if a kid wants to wash some dishes at school under adult supervision for a limited amount of time, I don't see a lot wrong with it. Obviously, it would be better if we could just not make families pay for school lunches, but that's another topic that isn't terribly relevant to this discussion.
Do you think you learned any valuable lessons that carried into adulthood? I started working in 9th grade as a busboy/washer and look fondly back on those memories; not only as a way of getting out of the house (bad family situation) but also as a look into the lives of the adults that worked there. As an adult now, I feel sorry for the middle age people who worked there because they obviously didn't really want to be there, but they needed a job and frying eggs as the local greasy spoon was apparently what was available. But I'm happy now and I get a small amount of comfort knowing that I can go back to that line of work if I ever found myself in a bind and needed to make an extra $2k. I'm sure my adult body won't handle it as well, but mentally, I think I'd be prepared.
At least where we were, you needed a special permit to work if you were under 18, and at the time that would allow kids as young as 14 into the workforce. But, they could only work part-time. I did that later during the summer between my sophomore and junior high school years, to buy a car from my parents.
But as a dishwasher in 6th grade, I didn’t have any adult supervision. I worked alone in there. And I don’t think that kids 16 or under should be working without supervision. And I didn’t have a youth work permit, which was most likely illegal.
I don’t know that I learned a great deal as a dishwasher that would be useful in the adult workplace, other than how to efficiently and quickly load a dishwasher. I guess if I had to go back to that kind of work, I could do it again.
Ironically, the car I bought from my parents was a 1974 Chevy Malibu Classic with a 350ci V8 engine, and if I had been inclined to do street racing, that would have been a perfect car to use for that. But I was a straight arrow and I had no flipping idea what I had in my hands, so I just drove it calmly (well, mostly calmly) to and from school and nothing else.
A couple years later, when I was in college, I wasn’t driving it at all, because there was no reasonable parking on campus, and was effectively forced to take the campus bus. So, I ended up letting the car rot, and we ended up paying a towing company $50 to get it out of the driveway and haul it off for scrap.
Do you think you learned any valuable lessons that carried into adulthood? I started working in 9th grade as a busboy/washer and look fondly back on those memories; not only as a way of getting out of the house (bad family situation) but also as a look into the lives of the adults that worked there. As an adult now, I feel sorry for the middle age people who worked there because they obviously didn't really want to be there, but they needed a job and frying eggs as the local greasy spoon was apparently what was available. But I'm happy now and I get a small amount of comfort knowing that I can go back to that line of work if I ever found myself in a bind and needed to make an extra $2k. I'm sure my adult body won't handle it as well, but mentally, I think I'd be prepared.