Want your kids to flourish? Send them out to pick fruit

I’ VE been pondering an important question during the final hot weeks of July. Why are there so many young people sunbathing on beaches and jumping into reservoirs and generally wreaking havoc and having to be rescued?

They’re everywhere! Camping in fields, hanging out in town centres, snowflakes melting in the face of a seemingly insurmountable problem: being unable t o see t heir phone screens in bright sunlight.

I passed one group the other day, camping by a lake. Every one had a hoodie draped over their head, all the better to see their screens. They hadn’t even noticed a nearby kingfisher.

This isn’t a purely anecdotal observation, that teenagers are no longer earning their keep during the holidays. Last week, figures were released showing that, since 1997, the proportion of 16- and 17-year-olds with a part- time job has more than halved, representing a ‘missed opportunity’ for a generation.

Esther McVey, Work and Pensions Minister, weighed in: ‘The jobs I did as a child and a teenager, then a student in London… formed me and prepared me…’

Just as bad as cluttering up river banks and precincts here in the UK are the hordes of tanned teens taking part in that unpaid postmodern jaunt, the gap year or, more common, the gap holiday. I remember, having covered a famine in Somalia, being seated on the floor at the airport, waiting to fly home: I was pale, gaunt, traumatised. All around were British teens – blonde, o v e r- c o n f i d e n t , bedecked with friendship bracelets – laughing and chatting loudly, sharing photos of their ‘like, so amazing experience’.

Oh, the myopia of the middle classes. They had supposedly been ‘volunteering’ with starving children but, as an aid worker in charge of one group said wryly, t hey had been kept ‘well away from any trouble spots, any suffering. They just don’t have the maturity to be respectful’.

I’m with Esther McVey on this. Being shunted and sheltered through tropical climes or the streets of Paris or Rome merely reinforces a misplaced sense of self-importance and safety: to put it bluntly, it makes these young people chippy when it comes to the real world of work.

Exotic trips don’t make them independent, or resourceful, or self-starters. They don’t drill into you that you will have to be on time, not spend all day on your phone, wear appropriate clothing, stop talking and whining, earn your keep and do as you are told.

THAT work is boring and repetitive. That you will have to do things you don’t like, day after day. That the world is tough, and not remotely fair or giggly or instagrammable at all.

I never went on a gap year, or had long summer hols filled with villas and parties. But here’s what working as a child taught me. Aged 11 and 12, I washed up in a pub to pay for my Saturday riding lessons, and was groped by the French waiter. It taught me to be wary of men.

Hours working as a fruitpicker in Essex taught me to live inside my head to counter boredom. As a journalism student, I worked as a coat check girl at the Holborn’s trendy Blitz club, where I learned never to work on commission: hip dudes eschew coats. Working as a hapless PA in an office, I learned how to stand up to a male boss who was a bully. I learned the sting of rejection, too: turned down as a Saturday girl in Joseph for not being attractive enough.

A good work ethic is the best thing young people can learn, but sadly too few have one, buoyed as they so often are by bank of Mum and Dad.

I’ve been helping two young women get a placement with an important fashion designer in London.

The first (older) girl wrote that sadly she would need to be paid a s mal l a mount, as she had to get the train into town each day. The second needed no payment, as she could stay with friends. The rich have so many ‘ friends’, don’t they? You can guess who landed the gig.

We were promised a more equal, progressive workplace. But I fear that if the young lose that hunger to succeed, it’s connections that’ll still get you places, not the ability to get up at 4am, to be the last to leave, to never, ever be a flake, snow or otherwise. To snare, as a teenage fruitpicker, that perfect last strawberry, and know it was a job well done.

PS

THIS, from Friday’s Times: ‘Homebuyers will pay 50 per cent more for a life of tranquillity in a National Park…’ Oh, the hollow laughter can be heard echoing all the way up here, in the Yorkshire Dales…