What value do we place on a child’s time?

[coberst]

What value do we place on a child’s time?

Labor has been commodified in the American culture.

I would guess that the average working person makes about $30 an hour. That would be $1200 per week and about $60,000 per year.

The average big corporate CEO makes about 500 times the average worker thus they make about $15,000 per hour.

How do we determine how much we value the time of a child? I guess we might say that a K-12 teacher makes average wages and has about 30 children in their classroom thus we value a child’s time at about $1 per hour.

Do we evaluate a child’s time too highly or too lowly? I think that we place too little value on a child’s time.

The lower we place the value of a child’s time the more likely will a parent or teacher spend less time with that child. The lower value we place on a child’s time the more willing we are to allow that child to “waste time”.

Adolescence appears to be something that has developed late in our culture. A hundred years ago a child became an adult at 16 and today that age often extends to the early to mid 20s.

 

[Samvega]

Knowledge is what accounts for wages. There is a bottom end to value/time and it goes up from there with what we've learned with our time.

There is know value that can be placed on information and knowledge as that's what is truly of value. We come into this world with one asset, our time. We can choose to use that asset any way we wish be it accumulating money, power, friendships, making art, music or learning.

We each set our own value however I don't think this thread is as much about age as it is about learning.

 

[coberst]

Our society commodifies labor thus the dollar value of time is a normal mode for determining value.

The more valuable a society considers a child's time to be the better care they make of the child's time. And the more valuable a child's time the less inclined a parent is to trade the time with the child for a minimum wage job.

If we placed a higher value on a child's time we could better recognize the importance of a good education.

Let us say that we felt that a child's time was worth $100 per hour. Would parents treat that child the same as if they set a value at $1? Would we value education at a much greater value? Would we value a teacher at a much greater value? Would a mother go to work at a minimum wage salary except in the most urgent need? Would we allow teens to waste so much time on non sense?