By NICK CHILES

Last week my son got laid off. His supervisor at the pool where he has been a lifeguard for the last year-and-a-half informed him that after Labor Day, his services will no longer be needed. Up to this point, the disaster that is our economy has lingered in the air of our household more as an abstract, media-generated fear than a checking account reality. Sure, we have been acutely aware of hardship around us—as writers, we know that book deals are harder to come by; as a magazine editor, I know that the ad sales team has to scramble with much more desperation to get businesses to buy advertising pages. The papers and television reports are filled with stories of regular folks sinking into the deep waters of despair and agony, good people losing grasp of tenuous holds on subsistence, survival.

But it all got more real when I saw the depression written all over his face, saw the disappointment registered in the slouch of his shoulders. Achingly real. Cause I know what’s going to happen now. As his check account withers into nothingess, we return to life as it used to be: ATM Dad. I know that when your teenage boy loses his job, your wallet instantly gets lighter, almost as if your bank has called you out of the blue and told you that your mortgage payment just went up $200 a month. Or your local gas station immediately doubled the price per gallon of unleaded. This impending unemployment is especially painful because the boy is four days from the start of his senior year of high school. If memory serves me correctly, high school seniors are a veritable cash abyss, a black hole that sucks up every dollar bill in sight. He will have senior class dues, senior parties, senior this, senior that—and every day, every week, he will have a gas tank always in need of more petrol. More dollar bills. More withdrawals from ATM Dad.

But aside from all the personal, selfish consequences of his job loss, there is the practical matter of what else the household will be losing. A teenager with a job is a kid who has enrolled in a daily course that might be called Life Lessons. In his job as a lifeguard, he is given a great deal of responsibility, imbued with the trust of legions of parents and children. That stuff eventually becomes internalized. While he still has his knucklehead moments, my boy made impressive leaps in his maturity and sense of responsibility in the past year. I could see it happening right before my eyes, days when he had to do his own problem-solving, figuring out his schedule at the pool, how many hours of work he could get in per week without compromising his play on the football field, how much money he could spend and still have something in his checking account and gas in his tank. It was all good stuff, lessons that it would take a parent much more time and anguish to get across to a teenage boy.

When I read the numbing statistics about the teenage unemployment rate, particularly among African-American teens, I am saddened to realize that too many of my son’s generation won’t get these lessons until perhaps it’s too late. A report on FORBES.COM last month said the unemployment rate for 16- to 19-year-olds was the worst that it’s been since 1965. For African-American teens, the number is even scarier: 38 percent. So that means this past summer, a time when a healthy teenager is supposed to be out collecting amusing tales about flipping burgers or scooping ice cream on the boardwalk, more than one out of every three black teens is sitting in front of the television inhaling his little sister’s favorite cookies and sucking down jugs of Mom’s favorite juice—or, even worse, he is out somewhere discovering the truth in that old adage about an idle mind being the devil’s playground. For too many of this generation, important lessons about the workplace won’t be learned until after college—if at all. That’s a scary, sobering thought.

My son’s last day is sometime around Labor Day. After that, the checks will quickly dry up and I will once again hear that ominous knock on the bedroom door, the knock that somehow seems to carry its own language, like drumbeats in the village. Let’s see—that one was two quick knocks, followed by a longer, louder one. Translation: “Uh, Dad? I need…”

About Our MBB Contributor:
Nick Chiles, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the author of six books, and the editor-in-chief of the travel magazine, Odyssey Couleur.

By NICK CHILES

Nobody told me it would be like this. Sure, I knew that when my teenage son got his license and we put together enough pennies to get him something with four wheels and a running (hopefully) engine, that I would lose a certain amount of control over the boy’s movements. After all, up to this point, I was the official Dad Taxi, responsible for carting the boy to and from football practice, and the job, and his friend’s house, and even to and from the mall or the movies with his girlfriend of the moment.

I complained bitterly about my taxi duties to anyone who would listen:

I’ll be glad when this boy can drive himself because I’m tired of being the taxicab!

Just when I thought I could rest for the evening, the boy needs another ride somewhere!

Little did I know how much and how quickly I would yearn for the Dad Taxi days. With stunning rapidity, I have discovered how much my life has changed with a teenager who drives. I knew in an abstract way that his mobility would cause me worry because of all those horrible stories and statistics of teenage driving fatalities. We live in a county in Georgia that has horribly deficient, practically non-existent public transportation, with no plans that I’ve ever heard about to rectify the situation anytime soon. So for a teenager to hold a job or do anything outside of the house besides travel to and from school, there has to be a car involved. This necessity leads to the troubling inevitability of teenagers having accidents. It seems like every year, a teenage boy (or girl, but it’s usually boys) at one of the local high schools perishes in a crash. So there’s always that worry in the back of the mind. But that’s not even what I’m talking about. What I didn’t expect was how disconcerting it would be for me to know that the boy is out there in the world, doing whatever it is that he is doing from moment to moment, and there’s barely a damn thing I can do about it.

At first I was Inspector Gadget, peppering him with questions about his movement, checking the football practice schedule on the school website several times a week, frequently eyeing his work schedule at the pool where he’s a lifeguard, trying to catch him doing something he’s not supposed to be doing or being somewhere he’s not supposed to be. I even caught him lying a couple of times, much to his chagrin and embarrassment—his boy told him that I was like a CIA agent. But recently something dawned on me: no matter how hard I tried, it was impossible for me to know where he was and what he was doing every second of the day. And with that realization came another one: if I couldn’t know what he was doing at all times, I was going to have to chill out a little about his whereabouts or else give myself a stroke. I was going to have to have a certain amount of trust in the idea that we did a pretty good job raising him, instilling values and judgment and decision-making skills, and from this point, just weeks from his 17th birthday, it was pretty much up to him to make his way safely in this world.

Of course, I was haunted by the memories of how much my life changed when I got wheels as a teenager—memories of things I did that I shouldn’t have been doing. My momma might be reading this, so I won’t go into further detail. (It was nearly 30 years ago, so I’m sure I would get all the details wrong. Okay, Ma?) But I guess I turned out alright after all, and those teenage days, even the crazier ones, all contributed mightily to my path and the choices I came to make over the years.

So as I watch him load his lineman’s bulk into his Jeep and take off with a wave in my direction, I know that we have crossed a major milestone in the parent-child relationship. Without control over his movements, I have relinquished a great deal of my authority. It is now in his hands, the power to make his own path. All I can do is sit back and watch. And breathe another deep sigh of relief with the sound of his squeaky brakes pulling back into the driveway.

About Our MBB Contributor:
Nick Chiles, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the author of six books, and the editor-in-chief of the travel magazine, Odyssey Couleur.