One of my first paying jobs was detasseling corn for Pioneer @$1.10 per hour at age 14. We started work at 5:30 am. Living on a large grain farm, I also earned money by picking up rocks each spring before the fields were planted and gleaning the end rows in the corn fields in the fall. I also washed & waxed all the tractors, grain trucks, pickups, and the combine each summer for $5 each. In the fall, I would pick up walnuts in the woods to sell for about $20 per pickup load. My 16th summer (1972) I worked/stayed at a baptist resort at the Lake of the Ozarks running the snack bar and earning $21 a week. They employed 50 teenagers and I must say it was very memorable! Of course most of my labor was unpaid on the farm and I spent a lot of time gardening, canning veggies, babysitting my younger siblings, cleaning house for my grandparents, and mowing. I got an allowance of 25 cents. A lot my "free" time was spent reading, usually up in a tree. I thought that I had a pretty good life.

 

Lets face it, it was good. We stayed busy, but I don't think we were overbooked like many kids today are.

We had something to look forward to besides.

 

My parents never believed in allowance either. If I needed money, I either asked around at my neighbors' houses to see if they had yard work that needed to be done, or sometimes I'd even work for my parents. Generally the work for my parents was more grotesque, like cleaning the bathroom or cleaning out the refrigerator (it was always packed with old, rotten food that had been forgotten weeks ago). I did that until I was about 13. When I was 14, I got a job at my local beach park ("Treasure Island", it was called, a beach on the side of Lake Fairlee). I worked for my high school counselor, who owned the place, and I earned a few dollars an hour for that. I worked at the gate, taking peoples' money and signing them in. I also did a little ground work, and at one point I even had to repaint the bathrooms. After all that, I started working for my neighbor, mowing his lawn and cutting down sumac in the summer, and stacking firewood in the winter. That went right up through high school. Then I started working an actual job at a local store, and I did that until I went to college, where I wasn't able to do much work--only part-time jobs every now and then. After a while, I ended up getting the job I have now, working as a lab assistant in the electronics lab of a college in Boston. It's probably the most interesting job, but it's also probably the most stressful. I guess that's the kind of thing you have to deal with when you get a job. Oh well...

That's my story. I'm sure I left a lot out, but I just can't think of it right now

 

We do not give our kids an allowance but we do buy them the things they need. They have all been lucky to find jobs in local restaurants and nursing homes so they do get their own spending money.

We did not get allowances growing up but sometimes we got money from uncles and aunts as gifts for Christmas and birthdays.

As a kid, my parents had a grocery store and we were expected to help out without being paid. During high school there was not much time left for paid work. At university during the summer break I worked at the post office sorting mail and on a farm.

The hardest backbreaking job I have ever done is picking strawberries.

 

In the fall, I would pick up walnuts in the woods to sell for about $20 per pickup load

Wow we can pick palmetto berries and sell em to big pharma for $6000 a pickup load.

 

I never got any money as a kid.