Child Labor

I don't understand the deal with child labor. We have my husband's teenage niece and her friend staying with us this summer for two weeks. Not ever having any children, I thought the idea of child labor would be of great help for getting some stuff done around the house. I guess I'm not doing it right.

First of all, I have noticed that it is a lot more expensive to buy groceries for teenagers than it is buying food for my dogs. Mind you, the selection for my dogs is only that of one kind of food, and I only feed them twice a day. But by comparison to kids, at least the dogs only use one dish.  

I am not one of them, but there are a lot of people that have never had children that like to put clothes on their dogs. Even then, the  amount of clothing for a dog is limited to one; maybe two sweaters.  If the dog were to somehow get the sweater off, it is still only one piece of clothing laying around the house to pick up, and definitely never any shoes, socks, or other unmentionables.

True, I do have to pick up after my dogs every day, and in light of that, I don't see any difference between dogs and teenagers; with the exception that I can legally lock my dogs up in one room to limit the amount of damage they may do while I'm gone. And maybe also that my dogs are of no help when it comes to programing my cell phone or downloading a file.

You would think that teenage children would be far more advanced in understanding and responding to verbal commands than dogs. I think one of the key differences here is the term "command" verses "request".  Either way, for the most part when I ask my dogs to "come" or "wait", they know what that means and will do as they are told. A dog's whole focus in life is to please you, where as teenagers generally don't focus at all at what you say to them unless it has to do with something that will personally please them. This is where I must be doing something wrong with this notion of using child labor. As I recall growing up, when my mother asked us kids to clean the house we did it. Not only did we do it, we were under high expectations to do our task at hand in a reasonable amount of time and the end result was to be sufficient if not excellent. We did not get paid for these chores; in turn we were fed, clothed, housed, and were allowed to watch TV.

If only there were a game app to program into the phone of a teenager that made it so that their only means of advancement is if they were to actually complete a task in the real world. The "parental control" must give approval upon completion of the given chore in order for their phone to continue to function. This might make a good modern day study similar to that of the research involving Pavlov's dogs. You see, dogs and children are similar. Although the whole electrical shock thing would probably be frowned on.

I guess it's probably a good thing that I never had any children; but I make a good aunt.