Welcome to Edit Your Life, a podcast to help you edit the unnecessary from your life so you have more room to enjoy the awesome.

Through episodes with me, Christine Coe, and a range of smart, compassionate guests, you will come away with insights and tactics to help you find the agency and space to simplify and declutter your home, time, mental space, and more.

Hello, friends.

I have a wonderful episode that I am excited to bring out of the locked archives.

And it's the perfect timing to bring this conversation forward, I think, since it's early May

and families may be orienting towards summer plans, older kids are starting to think about jobs.

Asha and I originally recorded and aired this episode in 2017.

The original impetus was a conversation in response to some ongoing threads I saw online about whether kids should work.

And there was the specific concern about work getting in the way of homework, extracurriculars, and free time.

If you have been with me for a while and have listened to Asha in my back episodes, you won't be

surprised to hear that I had some strong feelings about this and we believe that there are so

many benefits of work, even when the work is hard, maybe especially when the work is hard.

The tips that Asha and I share in this episode are Evergreen and it was really wild to listen back to this seven-year-old gem because our kids were so much younger, obviously, and in some ways they were just forging their way into work as tweens and young teens.

So please note, there are some things we reference that are out of

date, for example, my Brave New World Design Studio, which is on hiatus, but the concepts that we talk

about are 100% relevant in the present. Also, I did want to call out a couple of things because now

having seen Laurel through many years as a working person,

both in high school and college, I just wanted to underscore two massive benefits beyond the actual dollar factor of working.

First is planning and time management.

Work offers such an important opportunity for kids to figure

out their schedules. And it's worth noting that there will very likely be some messups and stressors

in this domain for kids. And those experiences are also really important. I think Laurel's

...