Do your children want to work?

Question

I have a Step son who does not wish to work. He was asked to leave the family home some 12 weeks ago because he acted very badly and did not wish to work. He did leave and has been on the streets ever since. He is 18 years old. How many more parents out there have the same problem? Can' believe that someone of his age does not wish to work and does not care about anything at all.

Answer 1

He probably has never had the chance or has been shown how to work or what it is like to earn his own money. This is a problem with a lot of kids these days. The child labor laws are partly to blame... kids need to start working at 13 or younger, and they need to help around the house at a very early age... 2 or 3 isn't too early to help do simple things... (fold washcloths, dust..) Parents are either too easy on kids or give them every thing they want at an early age. My son is 9, he can drive a vehicle, tractors, bale hay, mow the yard, dust, vacuum, sweep, load the dishwasher, fold clothes and feed the animals. He works all summer long. I am hoping he will know what it is like and how it feels to work hard and earn money...... but we have shown him how to do things.... maybe your step son needs someone to show him how to work, change the oil in the car, use a wrench, mow the yard etc etc.... good luck

Answer 2

Hi, I am a single parent. I have 4 sons. Communication was the most important aspect of bringing up the boys. I made strict rules that if they wanted to leave school in Yr 10, they had to have work before the end of the Christmas break. If not they had to go back to school until they found employment or until they completed Yr 12. (this is Australian schooling).They were told that life wasn't a free ride and they couldn't live in my home receiving welfare payments and watching TV all day. This wasn't a once off conversation. We had many discussions on this. The end result was that they all have great jobs. My youngest son left school in 2005. He turns 18 this year and is a second yr apprentice boilermaker/fabricator. I guess really instilling values is very important. Not easy. But persistence and communication do pay off. Good luck.

Answer 3

I've been fortunate in the fact that my daughter, 19, wants to work and has a good idea of where and how to get there,(she actually has a few choices for careers and is doing everything she can to get the qualifications she needs) she lives out of home by herself, a choice she made to learn how to cope as an adult in the real world.
As the others have already said, you have done the right thing, at his age he needs to learn how to stand on his own two feet, he'll make mistakes along the way but this should make him stronger and hopefully a mature adult in the end.

Answer 4

I know this is hard, but you DID THE RIGHT THING by showing "TOUGH LOVE" and kicking him out of the Home. I can also probably guess that this one was definitely abusing and/or disrespecting you, your HOME, and your house rules .. and the only thing he did was bring destruction and suffering into your life through his selfish, "Me First", nasty and lazy "Attitude Problems".

Unfortunately ... a LOT of late teens/young adults are this way -- the sense of "entitlement" that they have is way beyond ridiculous -- it is downright INSANE!

I am a Long Term Single Parent Myself, and put my foot down ... after all, I was older when I had them, went through a short disaster of a marriage (to a violent/abusive ex with mental illness problems), and yes, they did DISRESPECT me, my home, and my house rules (and brought nastiness and destruction in their wake.

Unfortunately, when I did kick the worst one to the curb, that one conspired with my Ex-Spouse (who I divorced approximately a decade and half ago) to BURGLARIZE my HOME -- which they gleefully did in August 2006 (it was NOT the first time this ex did something like this). I did file the police report, did the Restraining Order/Protective Order, and yes, demanded that they be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

NOW ... one is definitely starting to realize the problems they caused ... but in order to LET them GROW into RESPONSIBLE Adulthood, I HAD to do this .. and yes, they NEED to learn the lesson that with

Adult Decisions comes either a Benefit from Good Choices or a CONSEQUENCE from the Bad Choices.

Stick to your position in all of this. YOU did your best, and now that the child is an adult ... they MUST learn all the effects of their adult choices. Yes, it is hard seeing this, but remember that it is YOUR LOVE for the child that wants to see them make it on their own and grow into responsible adulthood.

Answer 5

i dont think any teenagers want to work i mean its so much easier when someone just hands you money, and you can go out with your friends whenever you like. my brother is 17 and after he left school my parents told him that he either went to college and got a part time job or he got a full time job. my brother didnt want to do either he was then asked to leave he moved out in june and has been living with his gran, and he still hasnt got a job. im 16 and although i didnt want to get a job either, not because i am lazy because i didnt want to fall behind on my college work, i did get a job and im so glad i did because it has given me so much independence and i love that i can go out and buy things with the money i have earnt.

Answer 6

I have a work-a-holic son and I love it. His financial future is already brighter than most 50 years olds.

Answer 7

Well Buddy, you did your job, now it's time for him to do his...He's old enough!!

Answer 8

In fairness to this young man:

If he has things in his life (usually a bunch of things that all add up) that make his life very stressful or that make him feel he can't get on top of any of the issues, he is likely to have elevated cortisol levels as a result of too much stress too long (and stress can come in the form of being unhappy for one or more reasons and isn't just for overworked business people).

The fact that a teenage boy has a stepfather at all would indicate that there's at least a chance all is not perfect in his life.

Elevated cortisol levels can make a person have difficulty concentrating and functioning the way a person needs to be able to work.

The person who has been stressed out for too long can actually then get into a situation where he no longer has the elevated cortisol levels required to deal with the stress and, instead, his adrenal gland can no longer secrete cortisol. As a result, the person is physically exhausted and REALLY has trouble being able to function.

Even a person who is not clinically depressed can have the above situations, but if, by any chance, this young man also has clinical depression it should be easy to imagine why he can't make himself go find a job.

Also, a PBS special on teenage brains pointed out that the prefrontal cortex is not fully mature until a person is in his early- to mid- twenties. One consequence of this is the person does not think as an adult does, may tend to have depression, and generally has difficulty because he may be 18 but his brain isn't finished maturing.

Also, kids who use drugs may get too involved with drugs to care about anything else, be able to function normally, or even remain free of damage to their brain/personality/maturation process. Any chance he's a serious drug-user?

Is there any way he's secretly an alcoholic?

Is there any chance he's one of the many, many, kids who is pretty intelligence but was lost by school because either nobody really knew how smart he was or else just because schools are often not motivating to particularly bright kids?

For whatever reason some kids are lost by the schools and don't thrive academically, most intelligent kids who don't do well academically and don't pursue a really, good, education live with feeling depressed beginning in elementary school and on through their adult lives.

He could also just be a kid who needs an adult he relates to help him find his direction. At lot of kids at that age are not happy with not having direction, don't know how to find their direction, and get depressed/miserable over that.

Your stepson could have any one of the above conditions. Your remarks that he "doesn't care about anything at all" make me lean toward thinking he could have a real case of depression or worse.

If it were my son I would not want to put him out because as long a teenager is living under his parent's roof there is at least the chance that his parent(s) can still attempt to influence him in the right way rather than leaving all the influencing of a troubled young person up to his maybe equally troubled but certainly equally immature friends and strangers.

Even though a troubled teenager (if that's what he is) may not act like it or may not show it immediately, the reality is that a kid who has a parent or parents who are supportive of him and who are not willing to turn their backs on him when he most needs them will - in the long run - benefit; and sometimes parents' decision to hang in there and do their best to get their son or daughter through a time in their life when they seem to have no direction makes the difference between a kid who gets back on track and one who doesn't.

If by "acting badly" you mean he was violent then you pretty much had no choice; but if "acting badly" means mouthing off or some other reasonably benign display of unhappiness, his mother may want to re-consider the out-on-the-streets thing.

If he needs professional help his mother has a better chance of talking him into getting it if he and she are on good terms, and if he's not trying to figure out where to sleep in Winter because his parents kicked him out.

I've heard the line, "Sometimes when kids are at their least lovable and when it is most difficult to love them THAT is the time when they most need love."

I know it is tremendously difficult to live with a pretty much grown child who "behaves badly", and there are times when parents have no choice but to tell the child to leave. If, though, the main problem was his not working I honestly think he probably has something going on with depression or emotional exhaustion or else substance abuse. People with depression don't always act like it. They laugh. They enjoy being with their friends because friends don't make demands of them.

There are the occasional young people who have been raised in a way that makes it not occur to them that they ought to work (in other words, "spoiled" or over-indulged), but those kids are usually more on the carefree-acting side; and if parents tell them its time to work they are not necessarily all that resistant to doing what just never occurred to them before.

Obviously, there is a whole lot more to this young man's story than you can present in a question on this site. Sometimes a kid may just decide not to do something if the person who is "on his back" about doing it is a stepparent. Children often (rightfully so in my opinion) are not willing to be "parented" by someone who is not their own mother or father. I have no idea how close he is to his mother or whether he thinks you are over-stepping bounds or that you have interfered with his relationship with his mother; but there is also the chance that this young man is operating on an "Its-the-principle-of-the-thing" mentality and wants to show everyone involved that he will work when he decides to work but NOT because a stepparent (and maybe even a mother who agrees with her husband) thinks he ought to.

I think his mother ought to set up an appointment with a counselor herself, so she can explain what is or isn't going on, describe her son's behavior, and maybe get some ideas on what she needs to do next. You and she could go as a team if you preferred that.

Sometimes its easier to just write off a kid as useless than to try to have understanding and figure out what is at the root of behavior that makes him appear not to care about anything. I'm not a religious person, but when I was a kid and went to church with my father there was this hymn with a line, "Whatsoever you do the least of my brothers that you do unto me." There are so often people who live their lives generally in keeping with the philosophy behind a line like that - that is until the "brother" they are dealing with is their own child. THEN they are somehow amazingly able to coldy dismiss compassion and treat their own child as a stranger in the so-called interest of teaching him a lesson.

I knew someone who took in teenagers as foster children, and so often it was because of troubles between the child and their stepfathers. Yes - I can believe that an 18-year-old kid isn't able to muster up what it takes to work and doesn't care about anything.

I've written all this not because I'm making guesses about you or your family or judging you. I just thought there is at least the chance that your stepson could use someone to offer some ideas (right or wrong) about some of the things that could be at the root of his behavior. There is at least the chance that he, more than anyone, would like to do what is right and what is normal but can't; and there's a good chance that his is his own worst judge and hates himself right now more than people would ever guess.