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From Hired to Fired
Help Your Teen Cope With Job Loss
By Tamekia Reece
As summer rolls around, chances are your teen may work a summer job. There's also a chance the job may not work out, and your teen will be terminated. Losing a first job (or any job, for that matter) can be a devastating experience. Here's how you can help your teen cope with job loss.
Probably the most important thing you can do at this time is to try to understand what your teen is feeling. To you it may have been "just a summer job" or not worth the grief because it wasn't a lifelong career at Bigwig Corporation, but for your teen, the job was probably a very big aspect of his life – even if he was there for only two weeks. "This is a teen's first step into the real world to stand on his or her own," says Ann G. Kramer, Ed.S., a licensed mental health counselor and author of Life Puzzle for Teens (Good 4u, 2001).
Instead of brushing your teen's job loss off as something minor that'll be forgotten in a couple of days, let him know that you understand what he's going through because you've been there before. Jeremy, 16, says the best thing his mom did when he lost his job was let him know it's OK to be sad without going overboard. "She told me it's fine to be down, but it's not the end of the world, and the termination could be a blessing in disguise," he says.
