Kids sure have it tough these days

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Updated: October 19, 2011 7:23AM

Kids sure have it tough these days.

I know that sounds strange, especially coming from me.

From the photo alone, you could deduce that I’m one of those guys who harangues his kids about how much harder he had it coming up, like how I had to walk miles through the snow just to get to school. And you’d be right (although I never used that walking to school cliche because we had buses.)

But I’m starting to see it differently.

There’s the summer job market for one thing.

It’s a pretty dismal picture for young people right now. There aren’t that many jobs for them in the wake of the recession, and what jobs there are don’t pay much. I read here just recently that only 25 percent of those ages 16 to 19 will find a job this summer.

Summer jobs were fairly plentiful if you wanted one when I was a teenager, and by the time you graduated from high school, you could get a summer job that paid real money. My dad got me on at the railroad, where I worked as what they call a yard clerk and made enough money over the next four summers to put myself through college.

While I may have been extra fortunate in that regard, I had plenty of friends who found jobs in factories, construction, breweries and the like. Most of those jobs don’t even exist these days, and where they do, the odds of a kid landing one for summer employment are negligible when there are so many older adults looking for work.

Then look at the cost of a college education. I think I paid something like $300 a semester for tuition when I was a student at Northern Illinois University in the mid-1970s, and now they charge that much per credit hour, which still makes it one of the more affordable schools. Like I said, I was able to pay for college without help from my parents or going into debt. I don’t think it’s even possible for a young person to earn and save that kind of money these days.

Plus, if I didn’t want to go to college, I could have found a blue-collar job that would have paid a decent living and given me a start in life. Now, as it turned out, that job may very well have disappeared in 10 to 20 years as so many of them did, but at least kids coming out of high school had that as an option.

Now, you pretty much have to go to college, not that it will necessarily get you a better job when you get out. Recent college grads are much less likely to find employment in their chosen field than they were even a decade ago.

But I’m not just talking about jobs.

How about terrorism? While those of my generation grew up under the not entirely theoretical threat of sudden nuclear annihilation tied to the Cold War, young people today have grown up having seen the very real effect of terrorist attacks — both international and domestic.

I’m not saying they’re losing sleep any more than I did, but they’ve certainly been put on notice that it’s a dangerous world in which they live — and that’s before you even mention the proliferation of spree killers, who were just getting started when I was a kid.

My kids barely count as kids any more, and I realize most of my “evidence” of kids having it tough skews toward issues for young adults.

But I’ve been thinking about this for years, seeing how young athletes are now pushed to specialize in a particular sport at increasingly younger ages, then find it’s too late to switch when they actually grow and start to realize where their talents or interests lie.

And then there’s the greatest bane of all for kids of the last 20 years: overbearing parents, of which I have occasionally been one. Telling a kid to go outside and play has to be better for them than arranging a play date, but we didn’t give our kids a world where they could do that. Nobody is going to allow their kid to play for hours unsupervised as I did in “the woods” — or its urban equivalent, “the prairie.”

You’re welcome to chime in or try to argue this from the other point of view. I think I probably ought to get home and chase a boy off the couch with a dose of parental wisdom before he starts his late-night rounds with his friends. You know how tough it is for kids these days.