What value do we place on a child’s time?

[coberst]

What value do we place on a child’s time?

 

Labor has been commodified in the American culture.

 

I would guess that the average working person makes about $30 an hour. That would be $1200 per week and about $60,000 per year.

 

The average big corporate CEO makes about 500 times the average worker thus they make about $15,000 per hour.

 

How do we determine how much we value the time of a child? I guess we might say that a K-12 teacher makes average wages and has about 30 children in their classroom thus we value a child’s time at about $1 per hour.

 

Do we evaluate a child’s time too highly or too lowly? I think that we place too little value on a child’s time.

 

The lower we place the value of a child’s time the more likely will a parent or teacher spend less time with that child. The lower value we place on a child’s time the more willing we are to allow that child to “waste time”.

 

Adolescence appears to be something that has developed late in our culture. A hundred years ago a child became an adult at 16 and today that age often extends to the early to mid 20s.