My husband and I both started working at 14.
When our oldest son told us he wanted to do the same, we were ready to help him make it happen. But it was challenging because most companies require employees to be at least 16, sometimes 18.
We knew we had to find an independent business with a manager willing to take a chance on a young teenager.
The opportunity came on a date night
We live in a beach town with a strong tourism economy, and one Friday night, my husband and I were out at a local restaurant. We’re always thinking about how we can open doors for our kids, so when our server came to the table, I asked if they were hiring.
She brought over the general manager, who had decades of restaurant experience. We explained that we had a 14-year-old son who wanted to work.
He was skeptical. He said he had hired a lot of teenagers over the years and said the pattern was almost always the same: the parents wanted them to work, but the kids didn’t. He said if our son applied online and emailed him directly, he’d be willing to interview him. He needed to know whether our son wanted the job or we did.
He didn’t wait to apply
We got home around 10 p.m. and told our son exactly what the manager had said to us.
He went straight to his computer, built his first résumé, and sent the email that night.
The next morning, he had an interview scheduled.
We talked him through what to expect, how to dress, how to carry himself, and the kinds of questions he might be asked. It was his first job interview, and we wanted to set him up for success. We drove him to the restaurant and waited outside.
He came out hired, with a uniform list in hand, and a training date on the calendar.
Our son has always called moments like this the alley-oop. We found the opportunity and set him up, but he had to follow through to make it happen, and he did.
Seeing him at work was something else
Our son worked at that restaurant for nearly two years. A month or two after he started, my husband and I went in for dinner to see him in action. Multiple people approached us that night, telling us what a great job he was doing
At home, he was a teenager like any other, but in that restaurant, we got to see a different side of the person he was without us around, a glimpse into the adult he was becoming. Focused. Professional. Driven in a way we hadn’t seen before.
The restaurant’s manager was a big part of that. He didn’t just give our son a chance; he invested in him. On slower shifts, he’d give him little assignments, like looking up certain songs from the 90s, listening to them, and coming back to talk about them. Our son took every single task seriously because it came from his manager at work.
Two years in a real job taught him a lot
When the manager eventually moved on to another opportunity, our son got to experience firsthand what leadership changes can do to a team. He’d come home after certain shifts, frustrated, explaining how things had changed and weren’t going as smoothly in his mind. He was learning as a teen what most people don’t learn until their 20s.
That’s why we keep giving our kids real-world experience as early as possible. When they’re still at home, they get to stretch and learn while we’re there to support them. Our son earned every bit of that opportunity. We just threw the alley-oop.
