“Would you like to be a machinist?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would you like to be a plumber?”

“I don’t know.”

Similar questions, with similar answers, continue.  Finally: 

“Would you like to be a doctor?”

“I don’t know—­is that a good position?”

Sometimes a boy is accompanied to the office by his father.

“My son is a natural-born electrician,” the father boasts.

“What has he done to show that?”

“Why, he’s wired the whole house from top to bottom.”

It is found by further questions that the lad has installed a push-bell button at the front door and another at the back door.  He had bought dry batteries, wire and buttons at a hardware store in a box containing full directions.  It is nevertheless hard to convince the father that the boy may not be a natural-born electrician, after all.

In frequent cases the father has not considered the limitations and opportunities in the occupation which he chooses for his son.

Mr. Deady has this to say on the subject of the father’s relation to the boy’s “job”:  “The average boy while seeking employment in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred is unaccompanied by either parent.  Such a condition is deplorable.  It not only shows a lack of interest in the boy’s welfare on the part of the parents, but also places the youthful applicant in an unfair position.  Oftentimes, owing to inexperience, a boy accepts a position without inquiring into the details and nature of the same.  His main thought is the amount of the wage to be received.  Consequently there is but one obvious result.  The hours are excessive, the work is beyond the boy’s strength or is hazardous, and finally the lad withdraws without notice.  It is this general apathy on the part of the parents of a boy, combined with over-zealousness on the part of an ordinary employer to secure boy labor for a mere trifle, that accounts for the instability of juvenile labor.”

The coming of vacation invariably brings a great influx of boys to the State employment office, some looking for summer work, others for permanent employment.  Most of them show lack of intelligent constructive thought on the matter in hand.  Few of them have had any counsel, or any valuable counsel from their parents or others.  To Mr. Sears and his assistants—­and they have become very proficient at it—­is left the task of vocational guidance, within such limitations as those of time and equipment.  What can be done to get the boy and his sponsors to thinking intelligently about the question of an occupation for the boy, with proper regard to their mutual fitness?