How’s a kid who’s spared hard labor going to get a work ethic?

Some nights I leave the Cub Scouts meetings I run feeling like I learned at least as much as the boys. Usually, that comes with the realization that, young as I still feel, pretty much all my memories may as well be history lessons to these kids.

This week it was the history of American economics.

“What are some ways you can earn money?” I asked the 10-year-olds to kick off a lesson on budgeting.

“Allowance!” “Cleaning the house!” “Birthday money!” they shouted back. Just like my kids, their only conceivable source of income seemed to be Mom, Dad and maybe some other relatives when it came time for presents.

Then came a cry to gladden an old heart: “Mowing the neighbor’s lawn!”

Ah, an entrepreneur!

But it turned out that wasn’t something the boy had actually done, only heard about. It might have been in history class; I didn’t ask.

I was lucky enough to get an allowance, too, when I was their age, but I got much better income from work that I’m not sure we let kids do anymore. And the real loss I worry about isn’t a little more pocket money to grease the elementary school economy, it’s that my boys might be missing the early chances I had to build a strong work ethic.

I hated building that work ethic, of course, but I think it helps to get used to the yoke early.

My parents did it the hard way with my little brother and me, which made all the jobs that came later seem that much easier. Helping our dad cut up fallen trees around the neighborhood, splitting it in the backyard and then piling it onto a truck months later so we could go door-to-door hawking good firewood for spending money might be the most physically demanding job I’ve done to this day.

Finding aluminum cans and crushing them with a sledgehammer was easier, but didn’t pay as well.

Then there was the paper route that had me up before dawn 365 days a year, each morning spiked with an adrenaline rush from the Doberman that waited for my bike to crest the hill in front his house for a quick chase down the block.

Maybe my boys could work around a chainsaw if we could keep my wife from finding out. But those other jobs are out — the price of scrap aluminum having fallen too low to put up with a pile of old cans at the house and bike-run paper routes long gone.

I’m not sure how we get them used to real work now. It might have to wait until they’re teenagers, and that’s the point when I remember my own budding work ethic was getting shaky. At least that was the message my Kmart coworkers and I heard in the chewing out we got after being caught playing volleyball with wadded up paper over the merchandise racks during store hours.

And instilling a good work ethic into the next generation of Espinozas has been a goal of mine since my college days, more than a dozen years before the first of them was born.

Back then I picked up beer money doing my part for NASA. Waste filters in the rat cages that went up in the space shuttles for experiments weren’t doing a good job, a researcher at my college explained to a group of students one day, and astronauts were getting sick of the shuttles smelling like mismanaged pet shops on long missions.

It became my proud duty once a week to sniff rat cages one by one to help researchers figure out which new filter might save our brave astronauts from the effects of rats doing their business in microgravity. It was honest work, and easier than splitting firewood.

The bit of cash I got for each sniff test came in handy on the weekends, but that wasn’t the only thing that kept me on the experiment.

It was knowing that if one day far into my future I had a kid who called me from college asking for money, I’d have a good answer: “In my day college students didn’t go asking their folks for spending money. Why, I used to smell rat waste for $20 a day, and I was glad to have the work!”

Seeing what a pushover I am these days about handing out allowances to kids who’ve never split a single log, though, I’ll probably just cave and send the cash.

Richard Espinoza is a former editor of the Johnson County Neighborhood News. You can reach him at respinozakc@yahoo.com.

This story was originally published November 18, 2016 at 11:29 AM with the headline "How’s a kid who’s spared hard labor going to get a work ethic?."