To think that parents shouldn't do this on behalf of their teens?

[bumblebee1987]

I have my own dog grooming business which is very popular with people wanting work experience/part time work, largely because it is mostly a lovely job involving lots of contact with dogs and puppies, so I completely understand the appeal with young people!

However, the vast majority of work experience/part time job requests that we receive (usually a few a month, more at certain times of year around school holidays etc), come directly from parents who are searching on behalf of their children. As harsh as it sounds, these are a very kind but immediate no for us. The competition for these placements is high, and I want to hear directly from the teenagers themselves, not their parents. It's great that your 15/16/17 year old is passionate about animals, but I want to hear that from them. I know that this isn't a high flying business, it is just a dog groomers, but it is my business that I have worked hard to establish and I want to know that anyone who I have come in and represent us, wants to be there, and they aren't just there because their parent wants them to be there. If you want me to spend my time replying and arranging a placement etc (which I am more than happy to do, but it IS extra work for me!), then I don't think it is too much to ask that a teen contacts me themselves? I know that teens have to do work experience and that the vast majority of them probably won't end up working in the sort of place where they do their placement, but a little bit of interest wouldn't go amiss, it's a good skill to learn, we dont all land our dream job from day one 🤣

Is this common across the board? I'm 38, but I feel like when I was younger, we were encouraged to do this sort of thing ourselves? I understand it more if it's a work experience placement that is arranged through school, perhaps schools are encouraging parents to seek the placements, I don't know? However if you are searching for paid part time work, surely this has to come from the applicant directly?

I appreciate that perhaps some of the applicants have SEN, but as a SEN parent myself, I would encourage my child to reach out to businesses themselves and would have a hand in guiding them. It's totally fine for parents to help, SEN or not, these are young people and the world of work is new to them, but a bit of independence is important isn't it? I absolutely love hearing from passionate young people directly, I love my job, and am always really happy to spend time speaking to young people about how to get into my industry and opportunities etc, but I want to speak to them! Email, Facebook message, website contact form enquiry, I don't care, you don't need to pick up the phone (I myself have phone anxiety, I totally get it!), but I want to know that you actually want to spend time in my business and are interested!

Maybe I'm being harsh and should review my policy of automatically saying no unless it has come from the young person directly?!

YABU- It's perfectly fine for parents to apply
YANBU- At 15/16/17, teens should be applying themselves.

I’d be cautious OP as the “passionate young person” is quite often a parent who knows how to write a good email that sounds like it’s come from a child.
I know my friend mum does it, she is a teacher and knows what to say. Her 3 children don’t have any initiative, she even writes their sponsorship forms for volunteering.
I would say there is a risk of widening inequalities with this approach , not every child has helpful and engaged parents who understand the system. there might be a bright spark child behind the one-liner “I want to volunteer” email that you disregard. They might just not know any different or have the privilege of having engaged and supportive parents.
In my opinion we created a system where it’s always the privileged middle class children who get most of opportunities and that’s because of the powerful parents behind them.

And I’ll be honest - I did write an email that helped my daughter secure her volunteering position for DofE. I could have pretended it came from her as most parents do but I chose honesty. I was clear about what her strong and weak points were and why I was emailing as she was not getting anywhere trying to secure a place herself.
My husband however drafted an email for his son (my dss) and made him copy and paste the whole thing into his outlook and press send.

Using your method, you’d have discounted my email but be impressed with my husband’s application thinking it came from a passionate young person.

No good deed goes unpunished OP! I think you are great for taking WE students, it’s a lot of work for a sole trader. But instead you get ridiculous accusations of discriminatory hiring practises 🙄

My DS17 sorted his own Y10 and Y12 work experience. But I did arrange DS14’s Y8 work experience as he was only 13 at the time and it was for one day only. I was very grateful when one small, local business agreed to take him on. Reading this, with hindsight I should have made him to do it himself.

I am not stupid or naive, I have acknowledged that I would expect parents to help.

Also not expecting anyone to clamour over trying to impress me, but this feels a bit elitist?! STEM students are no better than anyone else, they just have different interests and areas of strength. This comment feels like you think they are better than what I can offer them?!

Absolutely they would. If you read through my replies in this thread, I have been very clear about this.

Under 15 and I'd be happy with significant parental input, so I think it's fine that you did it for your 13 year old. I just feel that 15 and up, an email themselves, with support if needed, is not too big of an ask!

Thing is that the whole process for many children will be completely terrifying - especially the prospect of talking to strangers and being rejected. Many children are young for their age. It’s a little harsh and might exclude children who most need the experience. Pushy parents often limit their child’s development by trying to do it all for rhem

i guess I am saying don’t punish the child for the errors of the parents. If possible just reply “applications are only accepted from the student themselves “

and thank you for even considering taking on a work placement child - it is hard work!

I guess it comes down to what woukd be considered reasonable adjustments

It is true, I could be dismissing some potentially good kids. It's just tricky as I am a sole trader and I work 50+ hours a week with a lot of enquiries. I'm not advertising these placements, so these are just people contacting me themselves, I have no application process or anything like that. Filtering by way of only accepting the ones that have come from the teens themselves, feels like the quickest option! I'm not entirely sure how else to do it that won't be time consuming in all honesty. I do always reply to every enquiry though, I never leave people unanswered.

I remember when I had to do 2 weeks of work experience in Year 10 as a compulsory part of the curriculum (is that still a thing?).
We were given a folder of employers who had agreed, in theory, to take a work experience kid, and then we had to select a couple that we'd be interested in.
If I remember correctly, the school then allocated us, but then it was up to us to contact the place and make all the arrangements. I went to a nursery and was absolutely bored out of my brains for 10 days.

I remember doing mine in an office, and I got to know the photocopier better than anyone else there, also bored out of my mind 🤣 I'm guessing this is why I get a lot of enquiries, because if you like dogs, a week with dogs and puppies is probably the least boring option, given that the level of responsibility you'd be given in most places is very low and most tasks are going to be pretty dull by comparison!

I’ve been reading this thread with interest. My DS will go into YR10 after the summer holidays and I suspect we will be faced with sourcing some kind of work experience and to some degree we’re already facing it with trying to find “volunteer” work for DofE.

I actually think the OP is being quite responsible and generous with their time and business. It can’t be easy to trawl through lots of enquiries for work experience. Not to mention the time, effort and money it takes for businesses to offer this.

The problem we are finding is that my DS is 13 (August born child) and people just dont take on younger teens. I’m guessing this has a lot to do with insurance etc.

I absolutely try and get DS to do his own communication but with help if needed. Until starting the DofE I am quite sure than he thought email was only used for resetting passwords and didn’t even feature on his radar as an actual communication tool. But with age (and a lot of trust from me in allowing him to go out with friends and be more independent) he is getting more confident and will take charge and order his own drinks/food in a cafe or restaurant.

Volunteering would be the making of him I think - if only people were willing to take under 14. I’m hoping his DofE mentor can offer some help/advice with this.

On a local facebook mums group, I have seen mums trying to swap football stickers on behalf of their sons! Don't kids do anything for themselves any more?!

Certainly there are ridiculous MN ideas such as not an adult until at least 25 but Work Experience has always brought out the wet pupils whose Mummy has to do a lot of the work or, in one case 20+ years ago expected me, the Form Teacher, to do it! The boy's WE had been arranged by the school in a place which interested him but Mummy sent me a stroppy note that her little prince would need to catch 2 buses and he wasn't old enough,15, to do that! What was I going to do about it? When I wondered how then he managed to get 2 buses to Old Trafford every other weekend she complained to the Head that I was 'unhelpful and downright rude'!

I spend a lot of time on an Interrail traveller's Facebook group, and there are regularly enquiries from mums (always mums!) asking for help on organising their 18 year olds' summer Interrailing trips.

Usually to a chorus of "Why aren't they asking for themselves?"

Try Cubs and Beavers? They usually need helpers and have everything set up for kids.

Or, in the spirit of this thread, get him to try them!

(But I had to ask DS2'S Akela myself on behalf of DS1 because yes, at 13 he was still a bit hopeless).

And come to think of it....it's a Europe- wide group with members from many countries, but I've only seen British mums trying to organise their teenagers' trips 🤔

I worked as a support worker for young adults with disabilities and one of the most important parts of the job was encouraging independence.

I helped many of the service users find work experience or part time work, some of them had significant disabilities or learning difficulties but it was still important that it had to be something they requested and they had to be the ones to apply with support.

I often had to write the emails or fill in the application forms but I communicated with the service users first so they understood the process and we would work out together on what they want to include and to make the employer aware of any reasonable adjustments that might be needed. The correspondence had to come from the service users email address and any responses had to be addressed directly to them and not through a third party.

As long as service users had capacity they had their own bank accounts and wages (if paid employment) was paid directly to them, they might have needed support managing their own money but they earned it so it so it was only right they received it independently.

Even though these adults were in supported living we still had some parents that expected the support workers to do more on behalf of the service users and were critical of the fact that we didn’t just apply for their children or attend interviews for them, I found it sad that they didn’t seem to see how capable they were with the right encouragement.

My best friend has two autistic teenagers, when they wanted to find work she helped them throughout the whole process but made sure she didn’t act of behalf of them and just gave the right encouragement and helped them see their strengths and weaknesses.
She attended interviews with one teen but explained she was their for support and wasn’t expecting to be involved in the interview process, she wanted it to be fair but still make sure her daughter disclosed the right information so employer was aware of any reasonable adjustments that might be needed.

These situations are of course different to what the OP was actually about but it seems common now that so many threads and discussions centre around children with additional needs when the OP hasn’t referred to the child having any.
The OP describes a situation then includes a comment saying “this doesn’t include children with SEN” and yet people ignore it and try to say the OP is “being ableist”.

For example:

”My sisters child has screaming tantrums every time she doesn’t want to go to bed and the neighbours complain”

”A boy in my daughters nursery keeps hitting and biting her”

”My friend takes her teenage daughter everywhere and we haven’t spent any time alone since 2019”

They include in the OP that the sisters child, boy in nursery and teenage daughter have no additional needs but people insist on commenting suggesting they might have and suddenly the responses change the discussion completely.

It is very very important to be inclusive and I am neurodivergent myself and my partner is autistic. I appreciate that people are considerate and take our needs and feelings into account in relevant situations, I don’t expect them to always be the focus though.

It would be nice to have a mumsnet discussion where it doesn’t get completely derailed with people getting offended by suggesting the OP is slagging off people with SEN or with disabilities when they haven’t been mentioned! It would be different if someone posted:

“My best friend brings her autistic daughter with her every time we go anywhere during the weekday, her daughter doesn’t go to school and can’t be left alone at home. AIBU to ask her to leave her daughter at home?”

If people then based their responses and vote OP is NBU without taking the friends daughters autism into account its only right that they get called out for it.

I didn’t mean to have such a long rant but it’s becoming more and more common and people either don’t read the whole OP or twist it to their own agenda or are virtue signalling!

This thread is the perfect example with OP having to keep defending herself against made up accusations and when she has done nothing wrong.
It’s also often a small portion of posters who vote against the majority of people who voted the OP was NBU.

Everyone has equal right to an opinion and can post whatever they want, if they don’t read the OP though or just make up their own scenarios then its a bit pointless and the person posting gets advice and responses that aren’t relevant to their OP.