Our daughter doesn’t want to go to her firm choice anymore. Instead, she wants to take a gap year and reapply to university, but she doesn’t want to get a job unless it’s at my workplace.
Our daughter did incredibly well in her Alevels 4 A stars. She worked incredibly hard for those grades and had been set to go to Durham to study Law. Cambridge was always her ultimate university, but she never applied due to the applications having to be in so early for Oxford and Cambridge compared to the other unis. Now that she has achieved these grades, she wants to take a gap year and apply.
I’ve told her that she cannot simply spend the year working for me. I want her to get some proper, real-world work experience. Almost all of her work experience so far has been with family members or friends of my husband. She’s never had a customer service job or anything similar.
I’m a solicitor and run my own business. My office is in the town centre of our town. It’s not a huge law firm or a Magic Circle firm I have fewer than 20 solicitors working for me. I have allowed her to “work for me” for a while now, and she genuinely enjoys it. In some ways, she’s practically a paralegal. She has been working alongside and shadowing the paralegals for around two years and does a lot of the filing and general office work.
But I would really like her to have a normal job for an 18 year old. Go and work in a supermarket, a café, retail anything like that. Even if she only did it for six months, I think she needs to experience what that kind of work is actually like.
I think we’ve given her far too much privilege, and now we’re seeing the consequences of that. She says that if I won’t let her work in my office for the year, then her dad will let her work with him. He’s an art dealer and runs auctions in London. It’s not Christie’s or Sothebys nothing like that it’s his own business.
The truth is, I feel like we’ve raised a brat, and I’m incredibly disappointed in myself.
She has never really had to work for anything. I pay her for the work she does at my office, and I even pay her above minimum wage for her age. When it came to her car, I told her she needed to save up for one herself. Instead, she went behind our backs and spoke to my husband’s parents, who then “gifted” her a relatively new Mini under ten years old for her 18th birthday.
I’m just so frustrated. Every time we’ve tried to put a boundary in place, she seems to find a way around it. My parents and my husband’s parents are all in their 80s. They don’t always know what goes on, and they would do absolutely anything for her. I’ve tried talking to my parents about it, but they just say, “She’s young.” My parents have more money than sense at this point. They’re retired and financially comfortable, so they feel they have nothing to lose by giving her things.
And it isn’t just our daughter. Our eldest son is at Edinburgh and is going into his final year. He’s doing very well academically and has had plenty of jobs, but they’ve all been “nice” jobs. I worry that we’ve sheltered both of them too much. I don’t want my children to suffer, but I do think there is value in being 18 or 21 and having to do a job that isn’t particularly glamorous.
Our son is 21 and has mostly worked in places like art galleries. He’s currently doing his internship in London at JPMorgan and his plan is to work there after graduation next summer. If that happens, he may never actually have had what I would consider a “normal” job for someone his age.
I never wanted my children to struggle unnecessarily. I wanted to give them opportunities and make sure they were comfortable. But now I’m wondering whether, in trying so hard to protect them from hardship, we’ve also protected them from learning what hard work, independence and consequences actually feel like.
Have we genuinely failed as parents. DH is much more blasé about it. Doesn’t think they need to work in a supermarket or just a customer service role to know what it is like to work for things.