Am I wrong to have expected 17 YO DS to have talked to us before quitting summer job?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP this is a huge parenting fail.

Send him out to get another job. He's 17.

No he did not need to talk to you. You should have talked to him about how he is irresponsible and spoiled. Ridiculous to leave the company short-staffed when he was given a free job. Not to mention his reasoning is absurb.

Really? This is what you call a 'huge parenting fail'? I can only image the level of drama you bring to your interactions. This is merely a teenager's mistake, not a parenting fail.

[Anonymous]

This is why I will make my kids work as soon as they can.

[Anonymous]

I’d make it real clear that you aren’t giving him money for expenses you’d expect working to cover. He needs a taste of reality - that you aren’t going to fund his summer fun because it’s too much work…..to work.

This.

It's not OP's problem--it's the kid's job and life. He should be able to make his own decisions without consulting his parents before making them. But OP also shouldn't go out of his way to reduce or eliminated the consequences for this decision. We need to learn to let our children fail in a controlled way. This is a perfect example of this. He'll still have food and a place to live, but his summer might not be as fun as he thought that it would be.

[Anonymous]

He made you look bad w the friend he was going to work fir. Other than that consequences are mostly on him but there’s a lesson for him to be noted there imo.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP this is a huge parenting fail.

Send him out to get another job. He's 17.

No he did not need to talk to you. You should have talked to him about how he is irresponsible and spoiled. Ridiculous to leave the company short-staffed when he was given a free job. Not to mention his reasoning is absurb.

I agree with this!!! A job is an obligation. Sure, you are free to quit, but… you often leave someone hanging when you do.

[Anonymous]

If no job, what's he gonna do all summer?

And really, the only acceptable answers are

- find another job
- spend 20-40 hours a week volunteering somewhere.

But chillin on his phone isn't an option

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My issue would be at 17 I would like a break. You are almost an adult and frankly I would be upset if I had to constantly watch/ entertain / feed a 17 year old.

I would make his life not pleasant if he wants food. My rules are breakfast ends at 9 am. Lunch is promptly at noon and dinner is at 5:30 . If you miss those times I don’t cook for you or clean up.

Honestly, when I was 17, I was in charge of my own breakfast and lunch. And had been for a while.

My parents would do the grocery shopping, but I was had to prepare my own meals. And when working, if I wanted to bring a bagged lunch, I had to make it myself.

The only meal prepared for me was dinner.

That probably started around 12 or 13. Even know, with my own kids my 11yo is in charge of his own breakfast and lunch. He can request certain things ('can you buy bagels' or 'can we do turkey instead of ham from the deli'), but he's in charge of his own food

[Anonymous]

OP Here

Obviously, we will not pay for car/insurance. We have always had a rule that we will pay for our kids to learn to drive (up until they get their license, which he does have) but after that they are responsible for purchasing their own car/insurance/gas. If we have an old car, we may offer it for sale (at a slight discount), and if you pay for insurance, they can share my/DH's 2 cars, at our discression, but DS knows that we aren't going to turn around and buy him a car/pay insurance.

I've talked to our friend, he is a bit disappointed, but my understanding is that hiring my son was more a favor then a desperate need for another employee. Not that I'm going to tell DS that, a job is a responsibility which is why I have been so pissed really. Our friend has known DS since he was a baby, and I honestly think is giving him a bit of leeway, but he isnt extremely angry or anything.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My 17 YO DS got a job for summer with a local business (we are friends with the owners/manager). For the past two weeks he has been going in on the weekend so he could train/be ready for the summer (his idea, not ours).

Just today he told me and DH that he decided to quit, and quit, this past Sunday. Before this, he hadn't complained about the job, and seemed pretty excited to actually get his first job. When we asked his reasoning behind him quitting, he just said that he realized that because he was working he was going to miss too much of his summer.

I am not all worked up over this, he is 17 and claimed he wanted a job so he could buy a car/pay for insurance, and we never force our kids to work. But I definitely would have preferred if he had sat down with us and told us before quitting, as I feel like this will have an effect on our house's summer schedule, and I just feel like this was a quick snap decision and he might have changed it if we got a chance to chat about it. My husband thinks it is fine, just a summer job at age 17. Am I wrong?

The owner of the business is a friend and he just...quit?

Every family is different, but my parents worked full-time and would have had made zero time or effort to figure out my summer schedule at 17 other than what chores I’d be doing.

I’d set the house rules/expectations. He sounds a little spoiled, but I remember my brother spending one summer at home playing video games and golfing at the local course when he didn’t have a job. I think my mother wanted to kill him.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If no job, what's he gonna do all summer?

And really, the only acceptable answers are

- find another job
- spend 20-40 hours a week volunteering somewhere.

But chillin on his phone isn't an option

Yup.

Personally, I would talk to him about having some responsibility for the summer. If he doesn't choose one of these, you can assign him household projects and chores to do. I have plenty of projects on my honey-do list and if my teenage child was not working, I would assign them to him. I would buy the supplies and then he can Youtube how to do the job. He could clean the basement and sort everything into "trash" (like old toys), donate and keep piles which we could review in the evenings, We have bins of old school art projects that need to be photographed and stored on a disk drive and then trashed; he could decide on which ones to keep, which ones to archive and trash. He could go through the pantry and the food storage, and pull out and trash everything that is past expiration date, take the old plastic shopping bags to the supermarket to the donate/return bin, take batteries and CFLs to the MOMs to recycle and so on. Tons and tons of household chores that get to be done if he's going to be home without a job. We also have a bathtub/shower that the caulk needs to be stripped and redone. We have a place where a tree died, he can clear the old stump, and we can buy a new sapling from the nursery and he can plant it and water it. And so on.

So, his choice, but I agree that sitting around on his phone is not a choice. And he doesn't get to borrow the car for hanging out during the summer. He was supposed to earn money for a car. If he isn't, then he only uses the car to run errands for us like the above chores, or errands like doing the weekly shopping, etc.

[Anonymous]

I would have never asked a neighbor for a job. Plenty of jobs 17 year old can get himself without you mingling.
No fail here. He will be 18 soon and has plenty of time to get a job and be responsible.
I wish more kids would quit if the job sucked. I have worked many jobs that sucked. My main regret is not quitting them sooner.

[Anonymous]

He’s just lived through a crappy year in a pandemic. Something we never went through as teenagers. Let him enjoy life a bit, renew friendships, and enjoy a carefree summer that will go by very quickly. Soon he’ll have plenty of obligations. The years are short, let’s learn something from this pandemic.

[Anonymous]

I agree with many of the comments but do want to add that if this seems out of character for your son, which you haven’t really said, you might want to have a conversation with him as to whether there was some aspect of the job he found problematic, was scared to do, uncomfortable, etc...and let him know that it’s ok to discuss it with you irrespective of your friendship with the owner.

I had something sort of similar (not exactly but it reminded me of it) happen when I was a teen and an older man was making me uncomfortable but I didn’t want to tell my parents about it so I made up some excuse as to why I was quitting.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP Here

Obviously, we will not pay for car/insurance. We have always had a rule that we will pay for our kids to learn to drive (up until they get their license, which he does have) but after that they are responsible for purchasing their own car/insurance/gas. If we have an old car, we may offer it for sale (at a slight discount), and if you pay for insurance, they can share my/DH's 2 cars, at our discression, but DS knows that we aren't going to turn around and buy him a car/pay insurance.

I've talked to our friend, he is a bit disappointed, but my understanding is that hiring my son was more a favor then a desperate need for another employee. Not that I'm going to tell DS that, a job is a responsibility which is why I have been so pissed really. Our friend has known DS since he was a baby, and I honestly think is giving him a bit of leeway, but he isnt extremely angry or anything.

You DO need to tell him that. You basically got him a job through networking, and he quit after a few weeks. In the future, this would make him and the person who recommended him look bad.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My issue would be at 17 I would like a break. You are almost an adult and frankly I would be upset if I had to constantly watch/ entertain / feed a 17 year old.

I would make his life not pleasant if he wants food. My rules are breakfast ends at 9 am. Lunch is promptly at noon and dinner is at 5:30 . If you miss those times I don’t cook for you or clean up.

Honestly, when I was 17, I was in charge of my own breakfast and lunch. And had been for a while.

My parents would do the grocery shopping, but I was had to prepare my own meals. And when working, if I wanted to bring a bagged lunch, I had to make it myself.

The only meal prepared for me was dinner.

That probably started around 12 or 13. Even know, with my own kids my 11yo is in charge of his own breakfast and lunch. He can request certain things ('can you buy bagels' or 'can we do turkey instead of ham from the deli'), but he's in charge of his own food

The first pp is hilarious. She sounds like she’s being so strict because she will only cook at certain times, lol, you don’t need to cook for a 17 year old. And you certainly don’t need to watch or entertain them. By that point, they should be starting to cook for YOU sometimes.