PenPenWrites

A friend, whose 23-year-old son has been looking for a job for six months now, has been through several stages of search anguish. He's a graduate of a top college where he got good grades. Last year, a long search brought forth a one-year, low-paying internship with a nonprofit group. That ended in August. He is likely filled with anxieties about his future–none of which he is sharing with his parents. The dad has urged his son to go to graduate school–while the dad is still employed and can pay for it. It would get him out of a miserable job market and garner further qualifications for a good-paying job.  But the son doesn't know what kind of graduate school he's interested in. The mom wants to see him employed. And she is going through her own stages of acceptance of the difficulties her son's generation is facing in finding a job.

Stage One: mild annoyance with her son: "How long does he think we're going to support him? When I was his age, I couldn't lean on my parents. I had to get a job or starve."

Stage Two: anger at her son: "He's lazy. He isn't taken this seriously."

Stage Three: fear of her son being resigned to joblessness: "I think he's thrown in the towel. He doesn't seem to be trying. He won't discuss it with us. He won't even tell me if he followed a job lead I gave him–and I don't think he has."

Stage Four: the unthinkable: On a family vacation with her son, her husband's three brothers and their children, my friend sat and listened while an uncle asked her son what was happening on the job front. First surprise: he answered! Second surprise: he'd gotten a job offer. It was for a job with an NGO [non government organization] in an African country. The country, however, was a desperately poor one riven by political instability. He has not decided whether to take the job or not. My friend finds the thought of him going to such a dangerous place frightening. So the stage she is now in is this: "I wish I had $100,000 I could pay someone to hire my son."

Now that is something that, when she was her son's age, she never could or would have thought about. But isn't that what some of us come down to–if only we could find someone willing to give our grown child a chance, we'd pay them a bonus to do it.