Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2004 6:11 A.M.
Snowstorm!! It is 20 degrees here in Southern New England and Mother Nature has dropped about 8 inches of the white stuff on us. I'm going to be 2 hours digging out. Luckily, I think work is going to be called today. Small yay, until I realize how much shoveling I will be doing.
I would love to pay some kid $20 to do it for me, but there aren't any around, it seems. Years ago, I would have had 2 - 5 kids banging on the door begging to earn the money. Now, the kids are all sitting and playing video games and can't be bothered. At least that's what I'm being told.
Gee, when I was a kid, we had to earn our own money for our toys. Nowadays, the toys are freely given. That's all well and good if the parents can afford it, I guess, but where does that teach a child how to work for anything? How does that instill in a child, the pride that comes with knowing that he/she deserves the toys? It also seems that the things my kids bought with money they earned would last longer that the things that were given. There is something about getting something through hard work that makes it more valuable, somehow.
Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm just getting old. But it saddens me when I listen to some of the kids today, "I want, I want" I can remember my daughter at the age of 12. She spent all but two weeks of her summer vacation babysitting for two families at the same time. She took care of one little boy from one family and two from another from 8 in the morning till 5 in the afternoon. She wasn't told she had to. She chose to because it made the difference between her going to school in the fall wearing clothes from Wal-Mart and wearing clothes from the Gap, Banana Republic and the other name brand places.
At 12, she did her own laundry, took care of her room and even made dinner a couple times a week. My son at the same age had his own laundry, garbage detail and shared the dishes. The deal was, if he wanted Rustler jeans, I bought them. If he wanted Lee, he earned his own money and bought his own.
He has a shoe-shine box and would hit the neighborhood bars. Half the money he received was given by men in sneakers that either felt bad that he couldn't do their shoes for them, or the would just give him a few bucks on just the principle of seeing a kid working at that age.
Of course, times have changed. I wouldn�t want a 12 year old going into the bars now. But shoveling snow, mowing lawns and babysitting are still relatively safe ways to earn a buck.
My kids never received an allowance. There wasn�t enough money in our single parent household. I was also of the opinion that since the three of us worked equally hard during the day, so each of us should work equally hard at home. Like I said, the kids did their own laundry. I did the towels and sheets. They cleaned their rooms, and we shared the rest of the house, but I did the floors. When they needed money or if I had extra to give, it was given not as a reward, but as their �share� of the wealth. They learned early on that nothing in this life is free. You have to earn everything. Through this, they also learned pride and respect. Pride in themselves and respect in themselves and each other. This isn�t to say, of course that they were always well behaved and never got into any trouble. Yup, the best layed plans and all that. We had our share, but thankfully, that was years ago and in the past and we all learned something from our mistakes. I guess everything is a learning process. Well, time to get busy. I free day off work is great but I have things at home I can do. Update. Brother Pete just stopped by for coffee. He shoveled me out and even shoveled the ramp! Eha! A 57 year old man with emphesyma shoveled my ramp and porch after gotting off a 10 hour shift of buffing floors and working his butt off while teenagers in this town wake up after 8 hours of sleep, truge to the window to see that there is no school, dump themselves into the kitchen chair and holler, "Mom, I'm up. Where's my breakfast! Damn little freeloaders. Later�
Later,
Cosmic
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