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Agreed to an extent, it's ok for high school students to go get some work experience, I did when I was that age. Giving humans a window in their lives where they can focus purely on capturing a portion of ever expanding human knowledge, and, to be honest, hang out a bit, is a good thing in my opinion though.

That said, lets not lose sight of what's going on here, the DoL has been trying to crack down on 13yo kids in meat packing plants. If this is the line that we're trying to push the overton window past, I want no part of it.

Those are mostly unaccompanied minors who have no other options. If you want to allow them to live here (as many leftists do), how should they survive?

> Dreier estimates that some 250,000 children have crossed into the U.S. without their parents in the last two years, and that the majority of them wind up working full-time jobs.

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/04/1173697113/immigrant-child-la...

The people who own those plants employing them are not "leftists", quit projecting biases.

Hah, bias. Did you somehow miss the comments above?

> Republicans seek to weaken laws against child labor

> Republicans continue crusade against childhood innocence

There's a lot of bias there. And if those claims were true (spoiler: they aren't, for counterexample, according to the article, Republican legislatures in Texas and Montana have strengthened laws, the Democrat legislature in New Jersey weakened them, and the Virginia state legislature unanimously approved increasing penalties), they'd imply Democrats don't want these unaccompanied minors to work.

Even though this is not, in fact, a partisan issue, one thing is clear. There are many leftists in this discussion who don't want these unaccompanied minors to work. So how do you all expect them to survive?

I dunno about blanket statements like that. It's situational, and sometimes up to nature rather than nurture.

To outside observers, I was a fairly spoiled kid. I didn't have any jobs in high school, and I had a light load of chores. It's not that my parents were particularly wealthy, but I pushed back hard and was generally difficult with them, for the sake of preserving my study time, my free time, and getting a good night's sleep.

But it paid off. I got a scholarship, and went to a state university. Classes started a few days after I turned eighteen. I went out and got a part-time job immediately to pay for living expenses. I worked hard and did my job well, graduated, and landed a job that paid better than my parents.

From the get-go, I was a serious worker who put everything I had into the job while I was on the clock. I'm still that way today, and I find that people are either like that or they aren't. I find there's no correlation between the people who had jobs as teens and how serious, responsible, and industrious they are.

And I hate to make blanket statements about generational stuff, but the incoming teenage generation grew up with social media and covid. These kids are extremely sheltered from my experience. I've got two neighbor kids that I talk to once in a while who are 10 and 12. They're squishy fat babies with 0 social skills and throw tantrums when they don't have their iPads. I invite them and their mom over when I have fires. They play games on their phones and can't make eye contact with me or have a conversation. I've lived across the street from a park for two years now and haven't seen any kids there ever. Not once.

This is all very hand wavey but I'm worried about this new digital generation. I'm now the person I never thought I'd be saying this, but these kids are soft.

Grew up with social media and Covid. So… they grew up seeing their friends turned inside out from social pressures we never had to deal with and in the meantime they watched their grandparents and other members of older generations die of a disease prematurely while being physically isolated for an extended period of their formative years. In the meantime when back in class, they get periodic drills simulating someone trying to kill them, their friends, and their teachers en masse.

"Soft" is not how I'd describe that experience.

The world exists the way that it is regardless of how you would like it to be. The very idea that somehow watching older family members die from disease or illness is somehow unique to them is utterly ridiculous. Even WITH covid, the outcomes were pretty good. They didn't have to worry about dying from measles or being crippled with polio, and medical outcomes are much better nowadays across the board. And the periodic drills comparison is also ridiculous. Kids for generations in the US have been taught to hide underneath their desks in the case of NUCLEAR destruction. Doing it for shooter drills is simply another scare tactic.

Soft is a perfectly fine way to describe them.

> They didn't have to worry about dying from measles or being crippled with polio, and medical outcomes are much better nowadays across the board.

Funny you should mention, measles is back, and worldwide fatalities is on the rise. And are you suggesting that US healthcare has improved in the last couple decades? Antivax efforts have made the possibility of a return of endemic polio possible since folks travel, and it's not extinct. Measles was on its way to extinction in the 1990s, but after Wakefield's fraudulent study and the partisan politicization of disease, a host of diseases we never had to worry about anymore are popping back up again. As child vaccination rates continue to drop, we will see it all again.

The adults by and large have all been vaccinated. The kids however are being treated like guinea pigs in an ideological experiment where the losers are the kids themselves.

And as a child of the 70s and 80s, yes, I personally remember the ever-present threat of nuclear war growing up. I also remember the teen suicide rate being abnormally high due to it. Kinda like the rise we see today. It takes its toll, and doesn't at all mean they're "soft".

It does mean that they're soft.

Necessarily.

If you grew up in the 70s and 80s, you likely lived during an era where your parents paid little to no attention to what you were doing on a daily basis. People had children after a childhood of benign neglect and decided that they were going to be their kids' friends and began to hover. They bought into every stupid little bit of propaganda and couldn't let their kids out of earshot. So now they have a bunch of kids who only ever get away from their parental units when they're at school, and they are unsocialized as hell because most hoverparents will take their kids' word over that of their teachers.

They have no internal conflict resolution skills because their parents would jump in to handle the situation. They have little to no socialization skills. They need apps to find dates.

Generations are largely what their parents make them to be, and these kids are the absolute epitome of soft. And they're gonna be real big mad in another 30 years when they don't get anywhere with work because their entitlement continues to outweigh their performance.

> I had a paper route for a couple years when I was 12 and got a job at McDonalds when I was 14.

Flipping burgers has always been legal, and remains legal.

> Of course I'm not suggesting kids should be working in the coal mines

From the article, Iowa now allows minors to work in "industrial laundries, light manufacturing, demolition, and roofing". Roofing consistently ranks among the top 10 most dangerous professions in the US, according to the BLS. Industrial laundries deal with heavy machinery and nasty chemicals.