Paychecks for the parents

On a Monday afternoon in early March, dental assistant and senior Aracely Blanco aided her boss with a filling, a crown and a root canal. It was a hectic day typical of her $9-an-hour, part-time job at Congressional Dental Care in Rockville. As she held a suction tube and watched her boss drill into a cavity, Blanco did not think about going shopping with the $270 she would earn over the next two weeks.

That money would go to pay off the month's mortgage.

When Blanco's father went to prison in 2003 for illegal immigration, the responsibility of paying for the family's $255,000 Silver Spring house fell upon Blanco's mother. Since then, to help her mother make ends meet, Blanco has taken on a total of six jobs and given her mother over $4,000 of her total earnings - a decision, she says, that was purely voluntary.

Nearly two-thirds of adolescents have a paying job, according to a 2002 survey by the National Consumers League. Over half of these teens intend to spend their salaries, and 35 percent intend to save the money. But Blanco belongs to a smaller group of teens who hand over their pay to their parents. Whether their parents spend their money on bills, necessities or luxuries, Blazers like Blanco feel both the pressures and the payoffs of working to support the family.

Money matters

For Blanco, giving her salary to her mother serves a dual purpose: to ease her mother's financial stress and to keep Blanco from feeling like a burden. "I see it as a privilege that I can supply my mom with the little I make," she says. Blanco considers her family to be between poor and middle-class. Twice a month, when the bills arrive, the worries surface.

As a result, Blanco works six-hour shifts at the dental office after school two or three days a week and on Saturdays. On weekday nights, upon returning home from work, she has no time for anything but homework and sleep. She often grabs a bagel while leaving work and skips dinner at home.

Stressful schedules seem to run in Blanco's family. Blanco's mother holds down two jobs as an elementary-school cafeteria worker during the day and a hair stylist at the Kensington HairCuttery at night. Between 7:30 a.m. and 10 p.m., she has three-and-a-half hours to spend at home. Yet every day, she still finds time to make breakfast and lunch for Blanco and to help Blanco's nine-year-old sister with homework. "She's so good to us - more than a mother should be - so it's the least I could do to help her out," says Blanco.

For Eddie, a senior who spoke under condition of anonymity because he does not want to reveal his mother's identity, supporting the family is not an option but a necessity. Eddie's father is deceased, and his mother suffers from a long list of diseases that includes leukemia, rheumatoid arthritis and a degenerative spinal disorder. She stopped going to work when she broke her back last fall.

Now, Eddie puts in 39 hours a week at a restaurant making $8.50 an hour. Because he is 17, he works more than federal labor laws allow. But he needs the money to pay for necessities that cost him $800 a month: car insurance, phone bills, groceries, gas expenses. Helping him are the worker's compensation and Social Security checks his mother receives for him and his two siblings.

This bleak lifestyle will probably continue for Eddie, as he doubts his mother, who takes about 20 pills every day and gives herself shots every other day, will ever recover. "She's on so much medication right now that her words are slurred," says Eddie. "Some days, she can't get out of bed." Eddie sometimes leaves school to drive his mother to the hospital; last year alone, he missed 23 days to take her to pain management.

All he wants, he says, is for his family to be happy.

"I guess it's not a bad life," he says. He enjoys small pleasures like watching movies with his mother on cable, which costs - the number flows off his tongue - $101.58 a month.

And for all he does, he refuses to see himself as the household's sole provider and his mother as a dependent. "My mom's still my mom," he says. "She did a lot for us, and I see this as returning the favor."

Paying back an upbringing

When junior Farhat Jahan's father lost his job, she also returned the favor to her parents by handing over the salary she earned as a cashier at McDonald's. Her parents never repaid the money she gave them over four or five months, but that doesn't bother her. "They're my parents. I don't care whether they pay me back or not," she says.

Though Jahan took pride in giving her parents her paycheck, she also felt frustrated that she could not buy food and clothes for herself with her own money. Even though she has kept the job to this day, she lost her motivation to work because she couldn't spend her salary.

According to child and adolescent psychotherapist Heidi Emmer, teens like Jahan should not feel obligated to provide for the family - that's the parents' responsibility. "The parent should be planning for the child when the child is born. The child should not have to take care of their parents financially," says Emmer. She believes teens should instead take advantage of their high-school years to have fun, enter into relationships and develop independence from their parents. Working a job helps teach teens financial independence, but they should save their earnings for themselves, Emmer says.

Instead of going into a savings account, junior John Douglas's money went to buy purses and jewelry. His mother used part of his pay from mowing lawns over the summer to purchase rings, necklaces and bracelets, preferably made of silver or white gold.

Sometimes, when Douglas returned home sweaty from eight hours of labor, his shirt soaked and grass stains on his jeans, his mother would ask for money before he could even take a shower. He felt annoyed by her spending habits at first, but he has since gotten used to them.

Now, he looks positively on giving up the money as a way to help his mother treat herself. He doesn't need the money much, he reasons, and giving it away exempts him from giving his mother Christmas presents, too. Moreover, his mother is just as generous to him: During the school year, she buys him clothes, games and special treats for good report cards.

And, even better, treating his mother gives Douglas faith in his own character. "It makes me feel good to be mature enough to part ways with my money and help out my family," he says.

"I felt dead"

Though Emmer recognizes that supporting a family teaches responsibility and unselfishness, she warns that it could overload a teen with stress - stress that might cause anger, depression, mood swings and feelings of hopelessness.

During first semester, the burden of earning the family's only income while taking on a seven-period schedule sent Eddie into overdrive. "I was so busy that I felt dead," he says. "I had no life."

He worked every day of the week and pulled a double shift on weekends, logging 56 hours at the restaurant one week in November. On school days, he woke up between 4:30 and 5 a.m. to shower, make breakfast and sometimes do homework before arriving at Blair at 7 a.m. He slept through the first two periods of every school day, and his teachers, who learned about his situation, took pity on him. "They never would condone me sleeping, but they would feel really bad if they woke me up," he recalls. Eddie devised tricks for sleeping covertly in class: keeping his back straight and falling asleep, sleeping with his eyes half-open and napping for five minutes at a time.

His hectic schedule, he says, has ruined his life. Because he was too busy to apply to colleges, he has no choice next year but to attend Montgomery College part-time while taking care of his mother.

Teens who support their parents are in a risky situation, Emmer believes, because they assume a parent's role before they have fully matured. Emmer fears these teens may become too self-sacrificing and continue to enter relationships in which they rescue other people, neglecting their own needs in the process.

"A bittersweet deal"

Eddie knows he is doing just that - forsaking a college experience and social life - but he accepts the sacrifice. "It's a price to pay when you have a family to care about," he says.

Others try to comfort him, telling him that his struggle to support his family will pay off later. But that doesn't stop him from wishing his life were different. He sees his friends listening to their iPods and envies them for their "nice, functional, middle-class" lives. "They go out on Friday nights, come to my restaurant, and I have to make the food for them," he says.

Eddie does envision a different future for himself: He knows he won't work in the restaurant forever. He hopes to become a musician or an anthropologist. But in the meantime, as he expects to have only a year or two left with his mother, he will stay the course. "I will stay at my house until my mother is dead," he says. "Then I'll start living."

He adds, "It's a bittersweet deal. It sucks, but that's life."