Back To Work: Reality Check

Remember when your babies had their days and nights mixed up? You tried desperately to keep them awake through the day, and then at night they'd be alert for 4-5 hours at a stretch.

Well guess what, they go off to college, come home and they still have their days and nights mixed up. Now that most college kids are home for the summer, I'm trying to get used to this again. Am I the only parent around who looks at young adults sleeping until 11:00, noon, or 2 if you let them and go: how did they get this way?

College kids do have to adjust their schedules once they start a job. Unfortunately, it seems like some young adults think they can live like people on the TV show "Friends," just hanging out all day in other people's apartments, talking, maybe someone cooking a dish now and then, eating, flirting, dealing with relationships. When do these people on TV work anyway? Eventually our young adults find out that "Friends" isn't quite as much fun as it looks on television.

I've finally decided on one hand that sleeping until noon if they get a chance is a phase of life like any other and it is probably best not to fight it, to just accept it as a phase they go through. But will we as parents be brave enough to let them experience a little reality check if they look like they're going to live a perennial "Friends" lifestyle?

I had to think of a friend, Susan (name changed). She recently started raising turkeys in our rural valley, one of the poultry-producing capitals of the world. She is an animal lover and very much an outdoors-type person, so the combination of being able to be her own boss, work with animals, and still stay at home with her preschooler looked appealing.Back in January she got one of my daughters to babysit so she could work without interruption doing the painstaking work of cleaning out the turkey house for the next batch of turkeys (an ordeal she goes through about every two months I think). It was a freezing cold day but there Susan was washing down the turkey house with a sprayer and disinfectant in a smelly, drafty, poultry house.

She said for a while she had college student interns who wanted to be veterinarians come out to the farm to get some real "experience" working with animals. They were so excited until they got their first assignment. She told them they could go through the turkey house and pick up the dead birds. (She wasn't trying to be mean, it was the most urgent job.) Some balked, and never returned to the farm. So much for the reality of working in any setting with animals.

Susan's little daughter, Justine, is a very verbal three-and-a-half-year-old little charmer and makes me think further of the reality check in store for many of our young adults regarding the hard realities of the work world. She loves the turkeys, which she calls birds, and considers them her family's personal pets, all 18,000 of them. When someone asks her what pets she has she responds, "Cats, dog and birds," and she means the turkeys! Consequently, when her mother is out taking care of the birds, Justine doesn't really consider it working. When asked whether her mommy works, she says, "No, she stays home and takes care of our pets." Further, she thinks that her mother takes care of the birds because there were "too many born" for their own mommies to take care of them.

While re-adjusting to life outside a college dorm when nights and days get mixed up can be tough, it's a reality that has to happen somewhere along the way. Or else these kids remain as clueless as little Justine, but then it isn't so cute anymore. The time has to come when we shove them out of the nest and say: "Wake up sleepy head. Get a job."

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Contributed by Melodie Davis from her weekly columnANOTHER WAY (http://www.thirdway.com/aw/).For information on using Another Way in a local newspaper, contact:ANOTHER WAY, 1251 Virginia Ave., Harrisonburg, VA 22801-2497; or call1-800-999-3534; fax at 540-434-5556; or email me at:Melodie@mennomedia.org