Kids Today Aren't Lazy. We Just Stopped Expecting Anything From Them

I spent four hours last weekend with a friend I've known since fourth grade. We drove down to Lava Hot Springs, just the two of us, no kids, no spouses, and talked for longer than we probably have in twenty years combined. Somewhere in there we landed on the fall of 1986. We were fifteen. It hit both of us at the same time that this was forty years ago now, and the math alone made us feel old, but the memories it pulled up were worth more than the sting of that number.

That fall my older brother Todd left on his two-year mission, and the family coal business landed on me and my younger brother Jason. I was fifteen with a daytime-only driver's license. Minimum wage back then was $3.35 an hour. Dad paid me $2.50 and Jason $1.25, which meant he got his whole coal operation covered for $3.75 an hour and still paid our insurance on top of it. Not a bad deal for him, and looking back, I don't think either of us resented it. It was just how things worked.

If you’re short on time, this video breaks down the core lesson in about 8 minutes.

Prefer reading? The full breakdown is below.

What Running a Coal Business at 15 Actually Looked Like

My brother Joel hauled most of our coal in on a flatbed trailer, and Jason and I unloaded it using something my

dad always just called a Mormon board, a scraper rigged with chains and cable that we'd drag back and forth across the load with an old tractor. A full trailer took two or three hours to clear, and by the end we were shoveling the last of it by hand. Then Jason and I took the orders ourselves, because the business line was our home phone, and I scheduled deliveries around school. Saturdays we'd run two or three houses. We got stuck in people's yards more times than I can count.

I collected cash from customers, sometimes three, four, five hundred dollars in a night. I weighed trucks and figured out bills and learned to be decent to people even when I was fifteen and tired and it was snowing sideways. Nobody handed me a manual for any of it. It was just my turn, because Todd was gone and somebody had to keep the business running.

The Part That Actually Sunk In

I've thought about this a lot since that conversation at Lava. I wasn't a uniquely responsible kid. I was just a kid who got put in a position where responsibility wasn't optional. And I think that's the piece we've lost. We keep saying this generation of teenagers is lazy or checked out, and maybe some of that's fair, but I don't think it's the whole story. I think we quietly stopped handing them anything that actually mattered.

My son is twenty-three now and manages a department at a grocery store in Rexburg. I was talking to him recently and he was walking me through his profit and loss numbers, comparing this quarter to last, like it was nothing. That didn't happen by accident. I expected a lot out of him growing up, the same way my dad expected a lot out of me, and he rose to it. Every time.

This is the same thing we talk about inside the 12 Pillars framework when it comes to legacy wealth. It's not just what you leave your kids financially. It's whether you handed them anything real enough to grow into. If you're not sure whether you've actually been building that with your own family, or just hoping it happens on its own, the Pillar Snapshot is a free way to see where your time and effort are really going versus where you'd say they're going. You can take it at the12pillars.com/pillar-snapshot.

We Didn't Get Weaker. We Got Handed Less.

I'm not bitter about being fifteen and running a business. If anything I'm grateful for it, because it's still paying off decades later. I think our kids are stronger than we give them credit for. They've got strong faith, they've been through real things, and they'll step up the moment something real is put in front of them. The problem isn't the kids. It's that we stopped putting anything in front of them worth stepping up for.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Why don't teenagers have responsibility anymore?
Most teenagers today aren't given the kind of real, consequential responsibility that past generations were handed out of necessity, whether that was a family business, a job, or caring for younger siblings. Responsibility tends to show up when it's required, not when it's offered.

How much responsibility should a 15-year-old have?
It depends on the family, but a 15-year-old is capable of far more than most parents assume, including managing money, keeping commitments, and being accountable for outcomes, not just tasks.

What happened to teenage work ethic?
Work ethic in teenagers is built through repeated, real-stakes experience, not lectures. As fewer teens hold real jobs or family responsibilities, fewer of them get the repetitions that build it.

How do I teach my son responsibility?
The most reliable way is to give him something that actually matters and let him feel the consequences of handling it well or poorly, rather than protecting him from every outcome.

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