Jason will be sitting for a boy who, because he was injured in an accident, can't go to summer camp and must spend the summer going to physical therapy and rehabbing from his injury. Jason will be driving this boy to his physical therapy appointments and helping him do the exercises he needs to do. I really think he'll be good at this job because he has lots of experience working with children (including sitting for his own 10-year-old brother) and because he has had to rehab himself due to several football injuries he's suffered.
It'll be great that Jason will be earning spending money for his freshman year in college, but even more important will be the lessons that this job, and indeed any summer job for a teen, will provide. He's already picked up a few of these lessons.
First, we encouraged him to apply for the position very quickly after it was listed on Craigslist. Jason has a tendency to put things off. But when he went for the interview, he learned that the parents had received some 70 applications, and more were still coming in. Lesson number one: The early bird does indeed get the worm.
Second, the father said one of the reasons he hired Jason was that he'd seen him working as a Little League umpire and had been impressed. Lesson number two: it pays to always do your best at a job, as you never know who's watching and how one thing can lead to another.
And I'm sure as the summer progresses, Jason will learn even more lessons – about being on time and being responsible, about persevering and being flexible, and of course, he'll have to learn about budgeting, so that his summer earnings last him throughout the school year.
In an article in USA Today, a number of CEO's talked about lessons they learned from working summer jobs. Chris Kearney, 52 and CEO of industrial products giant SPX, was 13 in 1968 when he made $100 a week loading trucks for the family-owned beer distributorship in Mount Pleasant, Pa., something generations of Kearney boys have done since the end of Prohibition.
Today's teens should think of every job opportunity as an important building block in life, no matter how menial it seems, Kearney says. "A successful career is built incrementally, one step at a time."
As parents, we can encourage our children to learn things like working as a member of a team, punctuality and dependability, acting and dressing professionally, and budgeting from their summer jobs. All of these are definitely skills that they will need long after their teenaged years are over.
To share memories and lessons learned from your first job or summer job, post me a note on my Facebook page!
Read more Parenting Perspective blogs by visiting the Parenting Channel on 6abc.com.