As a nation, we are wasting one of our greatest human resources. An entire miniature workforce is being denied from pulling its weight.
Instead of working their rightful shifts in American factories, assembly lines and fast-food restaurants to make honest wages, they are instead piggy-backing on the tax dollars of hard-working, middle-aged Americans.
Toddlers are the new backbone of the American workforce.
We coddle our children with nap time, snack time and play time. We waste precious fossil fuel on the minivans that transport these deadbeats to their soccer games. Instead of spreadsheets, we give them storybooks. Instead of life skills, we give them juice boxes.
For a demographic that has so little job training that it can’t tie its own shoes, we give a lot of praise and promise to this group, a small percentage of the American people.
It’s time to submit them to more than half-day kindergarten.
It’s only in recent American history that we’ve realized our wasteful and inefficient way of living. It’s widely known how we’ve wasted our physical resources unaware of the environmental consequences, but how we’ve wasted our human resources, or in other words, our workforce, is rarely examined.
One demographic at a time has enjoyed the frivolous reprieve from hard labor our ignorance has bestowed upon them. Remember that until the mid-1900’s, women were isolated from work within their suburban oasis, free of the responsibility to contribute anything to our GDP.
After years of progress, we’ve finally seen the light and reached the point where women make up half our workforce. The next inevitable step forward is to put the children to work.
Critics of this proposal would say it’s cruel and barbaric to make the delicate leaders of tomorrow work for their living. But when you consider the economic burden facing these children, it’s cruel and unjust to prolong them any longer in earning the money that will finally pay back our federal deficits.
Unless our rugrats earn a taste for long hours and hard work now, they will never have the backbone necessary to pay for our war in Iraq, the federal stimulus plan and the interest we are accumulating in China.
I propose a place where our children can concentrate on building skills they will need for the rest of their life. Instead of daycare, we need day labor.
If you’re also a supporter of child labor, send an e-mail to melissa.silva@asu.edu.
