Hungry
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Last week I had a thought about what it means to be hungry. I was thinking about all of the young people we employ at Sugar Hill Creamery and I was thinking about how some of them want to work as many hours as possible without a break and others are happy to work their two shifts a week with shift breaks and lots of days between when they come in.
Then I thought about my children and which category they’d fall into–the scoopers who want all the shifts or the ones that are fine having an extra curricular activity called a job. I talk about which they’ll be with my closest friends. I also talk about the work ethic I see in both groups on our scooping team–they both have strong work ethics but the first group is hungrier and that’s because in many cases they’ve been pushed to.
Image: Some of our scoopers at the end of season gathering a couple of weeks ago
Generally, the scoopers who want all the shifts with no breaks have received the message from home that they better work if they want discretionary income because it’s not coming from their parents’ wallets OR they have no extra curricular activities and enjoy the work enough that they want to work as many shifts as they can. Generally, the scoopers who are happy to get what we give them and never advocate for more are often living in homes where many of their needs and discretionary desires are being met. Whether they have a job or not, someone at home is footing the majority of the bill. And whoever is footing that bill is doing it past the age of 18. For context, the median age of our front of house team is 20.1 years old. Many of our scoopers are in college in the city, live in the city and are heading to college outside of the city, or have decided not to attend college after graduating from high school.
The difference between these two groups is that the first group doesn’t have the option to not demonstrate these remarkable traits that will position them well in the future–they must provide for their own wants. The second group has the choice and because there’s no pressure for them to provide for themselves, it’s unclear when they’ll get hungry.
And this is what keeps me up at night. Our kids don’t work at the shop at all. They have house chores, but they have no sources of true income. Context here: they are 8, 10, and 13 and Nick and I don’t believe in paying for house chores. But as a result of this current approach to raising them, they do not have a concept of the exchange between labor and money and how that allows them to eat and do fun things.
Image: A shot from yesterday’s last collab with Charles Pan-Fried Chicken
Just last night, one of my children who shall not be identified (but if you know them, you may be able to guess who it is) was trying to see if they could coordinate a sleepover at our house for one of their friends. I told them to look at my calendar. They did and they said, “You don’t have anything but work.” I literally howled. I reminded them that we, unfortunately, do not yet exclusively live on our investments and work is how we all eat.
I’ve written before that the kids have been pretty sheltered from restaurant life. They don’t come with Nick and me everywhere. They can’t operate the store with their eyes closed. Nick and I have tag teamed on watching them at home or taking them to other places outside of the stores when the other parent is busy. And that’s not because we wanted to protect them from something but because it was just easier for us to juggle everything while keeping a safe and sanitary environment at work–having your two or three year old run around an ice cream production facility is neither safe nor likely sanitary because is that child keeping their hairnet on and will they try to eat an inclusion off a tray before it gets dumped into the ice cream? Nope and yes.
As a result, they’ve been sheltered and don’t fully understand or appreciate the labor that has been or is required to keep all the plates spinning. For restaurant children, they have lived a charmed life and I’m not sure I like that.
In a conversation last week with a restaurant friend who is both first gen and the daughter of a pioneering restaurateur, and now a restaurateur with three kids herself, we were talking about how to balance parenting so your kids don’t become aloof and overly privileged but also not traumatized and scarred by how hard it was to grow up with fewer resources. Her conclusion was that if you have some resources to share with your kids, you just have to fabricate scarcity so they don’t become entitled and insufferable.
Image: A peak of what we were serving at yesterday’s collab — this person ordered the cornbread base with chicken, and a scoop of our cornbread ice cream topped with peach hot sauce accompanied by a cup of Beloved, a canned Nutcracker (IYKYK)
I do this throughout the year by not buying our kids clothes. They mostly only wear hand-me-downs sourced from families at church and friends in the neighborhood. I can easily say that I’ve not spent more than $2500 on our kids’ clothes over their collective lifetimes. If they want to buy something special, they have to do it with birthday money. Our 13-year-old is now getting to the stage where she wants to look a particular way. She is very good about using her saved up money for these things but I can see her desires outpacing her wallet within the year.
When I think back to my own childhood, I think I fell under the job-as-extracurricular-activity class of scoopers we have at the store. My mom provided for me. She didn’t make me get a job and I wasn’t hungry enough for monetary resources to really find one on my own. In my defense, I did try one spring in high school, but neither Urban Outfitters nor the Gap would hire me because I didn’t know how to fill out a job application correctly. And when I say this, I mean that I didn’t know that I had to feign open availability. I put the availability that I had, which obviously didn’t work for retail. In retail, it’s better to have more availability than not and I was busy being the President of the Future Business Leaders of America and the Varsity Basketball Manager with only four hours two days a week to spare for paid work.
It wasn’t always easy for my mom to give me the life she did–I had a great education from kindergarten to college and great life experiences. I think she provided for me in this way because she fell into the other group of scoopers; she worked early and earned her own money to provide for her wants and possibly some of her needs–she didn’t have a choice not to. And, as parents, it’s almost inevitable that we will overcompensate for some lack we experienced in our childhoods.
But as a result of what she provided, I spent a good portion of my young adult life underemployed and actually physically hungry because I prioritized the extra curricular activities in high school instead of earning to have spending money in college, and the college internships my professors were helping me get instead of the paying work that would allow me to eat as a college student in New York City. I feel like I could have learned the lesson on how labor yields money that can support you in the present and future a little earlier if I had been hungrier to earn money when I was younger. But I was focused on my studies and the activities that I felt would make for a compelling college resume. And, while it worked out in the end, learning the lesson much later after truly being hungry for long enough living in this city on my own was arguably more painful.
The question is, which approach is better?
Image: Ila with her track friends inside of the Burger King by their bus stop to head to running camp
The answer will be different for everyone, but for me, I want my kids to learn how to be hungry earlier. This discomfort of not having the shoes you want and figuring out how to get them is a softer blow than being in a city trying to pay your rent without the slightest clue on how to do it in a timely fashion.
When you’re hungry you’re motivated to action and it costs less when you learn this lesson at an early age.
I don’t want our kids to walk through this world with a false sense of belly-fullness that they are not motivated to do anything. I don’t want them to think that being studious and getting good grades is enough. Showing up at a job, being accountable, seeing the cause and effect of working in exchange for money are valuable lessons that give any child’s academic ability ammunition.
I have decided to deprive my kids as much as possible, without creating trauma, to catalyze the hunger that will hopefully motivate them towards action. Just today, I saw for the first time my 10-year-old heat herself up a bowl of pesto pasta from dinner two nights ago without my intervention. Prior to this summer, she would have complained of being hungry and nagged me to make her something to eat while I was on a work call. Today, she knew that I was operating on three hours of sleep following yesterday’s amazing collab with Charles Pan-Fried Chicken and then having to catch up on work things when I got home. I needed to close my eyes for 90 minutes during lunch time to literally function. And she knew that. I was useless to her but her belly was calling. She was hungry enough to look in the fridge to see what she could eat because at the start of the summer I told the kids that I couldn’t be their short order cook in the middle of the workday. It took her two months and the realization that no one was going to make her anything that moved her into action to feed herself. The deprivation in this case was not intentional, but the circumstances–mommy can’t move right now–created the scene for her to rise to the occasion.
And it’s circumstances, whether unavoidable or constructed, that prompt kids to rise on their own.
I pray all of my children rise to similar occasions when it’s time to start generating income, and that day is sooner than they think, especially for the 13-year-old.
Petrushka
Your Local Ice Cream Lady & Life/Business Coach