The route to independence for pre-teen boys in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s was paved with paper:

Newspapers.

Before there was a digital, instant-access-age, twice daily local newspapers
were hand delivered to America’s door-steps by an army of young boys, over a million
strong at its zenith. Nearly half of all of the nation’s newspapers were handled by these
young entrepreneurs and I was one of them. Sadly, today that number has dropped to
near zero.

Commitment, being on time, managing your time, honesty, accuracy, math skills,-addingsubtracting,
managing money, counting change, managing credit, marketing, customerrelations,
communication, handling complaints, paper-work, banking, coping with
weather, delays, illness, fitness all of this and more was the responsibility of the newly
minted pre-teen business owner. As my customers came to know me, I mowed their
lawns in the summer and shoveled snow from their sidewalks and driveways in the winter.
How would that reality affect today’s pre-teens and teens?

I attended one of the highest ranked business schools in the country and I learned far
more about the realities of enterprise and life managing my paper route as a 12-year-old
than I did at the university. I’m still an entrepreneur and I continue to use those old,
familiar lessons every day; street-reality forged by experience. I was up-sell-marketing
before I knew it was a business term.

The real tragedy here is that right now, today, we have done nothing to replace that kind
of invaluable experience for our young people. There is a price to be paid for ignoring
this void and if you can pry the cell phones and ear-buds off today’s teens and pre-teens,
that blind spot we are ignoring becomes abundantly obvious by their blank stares and
struggle to effectively communicate.

My “graduation” from the paper-route was to the local gas station, a natural transition in
those days because customers did not pump their own gas, attendants did. Just shy of 16
and anxious to get my license, I was saving to trade my bicycle for a motorcycle and
eventually a car. A service station seemed like the place to learn more about all things
mechanical. Pumping gas for customers led to learning how to check the oil, filling or
changing a tire, even changing the oil, or spark plugs. Over time, even more methods of
mechanical know-how became a puzzle I solved that granted me access to remedies and
possibilities I previously knew nothing about and could not otherwise afford. Knowledge
becomes power when you can solve your own mechanical problems and at the same time
save money and gain independence. It was liberating, empowering and it gave me
confidence. It was a way to advance one more rung on life’s ladder and gain my
independence. I could transform a junk car into something useable and do it on a small
budget and when it broke, I could fix it.

Self-service gas pumping, grocery scanning and a host of other jobs previously manned
by an army of school-aged kids are now extinct in the age of automation. Again, we
leave behind a void and no intention of filling it, yet can we really expect to suffer no
effect? What I describe was my life growing up. Thank God for it and Thank God I was
able to introduce these kinds of working values to my own children, a genuine work-ethic.
Kids peddling newspapers and pumping gas are jobs and experiences never coming back
however, the life skills those jobs and many others like them instilled in those kids
provided a tremendous benefit we fail to provide today. Like everything in life, there is a
price for this failing and we can see it all around us as the mobs of phone-obsessed kids
trudge through life oblivious to their surroundings, mind-numbed by a screen and sadly
lacking of any of the kinds of “street-smarts” I managed to learn.

Today’s parental insistence on the physical “safety” of their kids justifies their hyperinsulation
from the realities of life. Paradoxically, kids will learn the longest-lasting
lessons about safety when parents allow them, (within reason and with calculation) to
experiment with their own judgment and at times be even a bit unsafe. You can’t know
where the margins are if you never push them. Close-calls forge real lessons and develop
better habits much more authentically than a hovering-smothering-over-protective and
lecturing parent. The mistakes and mis-steps we prevent our kids from taking will
correspondingly fail to teach them anything. Failure is a wonderful teacher when
consequences have real sting.

The illusion of safety is represented by a parent believing that the act of knowing their
kids’ whereabouts is sufficient. The actual threat comes silently from screens and earbuds
and knows no safe boundaries. While parents may sit in the same room with their
kids, digital forces from unknown sources are competing for dominance and control of
their thoughts.

The reality of my childhood that involved, literally, playing on the railroad tracks,
hopping trains and jumping off cliffs into the deep waters of abandoned gravel pits was a
better and more effective character developing experience that I would argue was in the
long run not only safer, but better than being mentally and emotionally poisoned digitally,
ironically under the silent illusion of a safety we failed to provide.