Forget whether the Upper East Side was plowed. Never mind that the city is apparently in the midst of a road salt shortage.
Bill de Blasio has already pulled off something many other moms and dads can only dream of: He got his teenage son to shovel the walk.
True, that was more than a month ago, during his dad’s first snowfall as mayor. Since that appearance before the news cameras, Dante has managed to be elsewhere when dad was clearing the walk in front of their Brooklyn row house. Even so, anyone with children will tell you that what de Blasio managed that cold January day was no mean feat.
In my life, I’ve yet to meet the father who’s fully satisfied with his children’s contributions to snow clearing. A friend of mine with three hardy sons once pointed to the zig-zag job on the sidewalk he had come home to, done on a day his boys had off from school. “My sons,” he pronounced, “are masters of the half-assed.”
Of course, this is to be expected when you run a command economy, which is the way most families operate. My own three children, for example, are all Chinese. When it comes to snow clearing in our household, they grumble about “uncompensated Asian labor.”
Even so, the snow shovel carries lessons and opportunities many kids today are missing. In my childhood, a snowfall was a chance to make good money. After my brothers and I had cleared our drive, we went door-to-door offering our services around the neighborhood.
That was back in 1970s, when I earned at least $5 and often $10 for shoveling a standard drive. According to the Bureau of Labor statistics calculator, adjusted for inflation that $10 works out to $60 today. Not bad for a 12-year-old, especially when there’s no taxes or FICA deducted.
(Another beauty of the cash economy of youth: Your gross is your net.)
Some tell me the demand for these services remains. A colleague who lives alone in the Jersey suburbs says that when it snows he’s just waiting for some young entrepreneur to offer to shovel his drive — and he’s willing to pay. Yet the doorbell never rings.
It’s not because today’s kids are lazier. As with so much of the economy, changes in the market have eliminated jobs available to earlier generations.
Technology, for example, has led many people to substitute snow blowers for neighborhood children. And killer competition from professional snow removal services has also taken its toll.
It’s the same with other kid jobs. Our family held a paper route for nearly two decades, handed down through six children. When was the last time you saw a paperboy? Today adults deliver newspapers from cars. Ditto for raking leaves and mowing lawns, now dominated by professional services.
Probably not much you can do about these things. Even so, it’s hard not to feel my kids are somehow missing something. Because shoveling snow is a terrific introduction to the job market. As another friend of mine says, being a good worker is something kids have to learn.
That starts with basic jobs like clearing away snow. When a child exchanges time and labor for money, the world suddenly looks much different.
He learns valuable life lessons about employers, kind and unreasonable alike. Maybe he starts thinking about other work people might pay him for. In the process, and over time, he acquires the skills employers rate highest.
What are these skills? They include being reliable, learning how to speak to customers, realizing that pay depends on job performance. When it all comes together, even if it’s something as simple as removing snow from a driveway, it brings him something that can only be earned: the satisfaction and confidence that comes from a job well done.
We parents play a role here, too. We all want our kids to succeed. By success we mean getting them into the best schools and the top jobs. Experience with honest but menial labor? Not so much.
So we do what we can, pulling strings to get our children a coveted internship or sending them off on some service trip abroad that will look good on their college applications.
Sometimes I wonder if we do our children a disservice. Because most of them aren’t going to be starting their careers performing heart surgery or writing code for Google. When it comes to a real life training, give me the gal who spent her weekends waitressing or the guy who hauled shingles up and down a ladder all summer.
Or a mayor’s son who still has to shovel the snow.