'What's the matter with kids today?'

"These kids don't know what work is!"

People of a certain age are prone to sit in their lawn chairs and spout off such things as this about the sorry state of youth, but they're somehow missing the point.

Kids do know what work is, they've just learned how to get out of it more smoothly, and you can't get out of doing something unless you know what there is to do. Kids know, and they're experts at fading into the woodwork when duty raises its ugly head.

Youth ignorance isn't the problem; it's old deadheads who don't have the energy, don't really give a hoot or can't come up with a reason the work is beneficial to anybody, including themselves. Often, the work only benefits the lawn chair jockey, and the slow kid who gets hoodwinked into doing the work rarely gets a thank-you.

It's hard to tell whether or not kids are lazier than they used to be. This is true because adults now have either not lived in the used to be or, if they did, they've forgotten how it really was. It may be worse now, though, because adults have come to think they own their children, and kids rebel against this sort of thing the same way slaves have from the beginning. This kind of rebellion starts about age 11, and its intensity is equal to the level of onerous ownership they've experienced.

What adults seem to be missing is the fact that kids love to work. It's just that they only love work that they can see benefits from, either for themselves or others. So much kids are asked to do is of no benefit to anybody and if it is, it's some lazy or greedy adult. Too often, it's fixing or cleaning up after some slovenly adult.

They're not going to do that kind of work very well or very long. I don't blame them. No one will ever find a more eager for work kid than one who's into doing something he or she can see results from and who has the sure knowledge that the work will be appreciated.

Such work, however, requires engaged adults. Often the ingredients of a good work ethic involve a smart adult with their eyes open who can catch a kid on the fly.

I was amazed the other day to see this work. The interaction involved a grandmother who was cooking meat and her 6-year-old grandson was zipping around on a mountain bike. The gloves she was using to pull the meat off the bone were slippery with grease. She couldn't pull off one glove with the other. The boy noticed, leaped off the bike, grabbed a paper towel, wrapped it around the glove and yanked it off. He abandoned the bike and stuck around, waiting for something else useful he could do.

The sloppy joe he got later wasn't a reward; it was a result. Something came of the work. What he did was important to others. Such lessons are never forgotten. They are automatic responses that come from hundreds, even thousands of such interactions between adults and kids.

That is not what many adults are doing. A lack of time is blamed. Meaningless activity will keep them out of trouble, we think. Negotiation with children over abstract nonessentials has become popular. Consequences never get played out. In an alarming number of cases, we are raising overweight or over-cute, selfish whiners who are turning into adult-looking victims of whatever wrong they can wring some kind of reward from, usually money. Such hothouse kids raised in the no-risk mania that grips too many adults are a self-fulfilling prophecy. When they come into contact with the real world, they have nothing in reserve to help them cope.

Such kids are the result of having been blackmailed or browbeaten into doing anything. The next time you hear some adult whose sitting in a recliner or lawn chair berating a group of bored, sullen teenagers, correct that lazybones. It isn't the kids who don't know how to work, it's adults who never took the time or the opportunity to teach them how and let them bask in the rewards of work well done.

Even better, dream up something for those kids to do, something other than busywork, and open a door for them. Its not too late. Some people don't grow up until they're quite old and learn to get out of a lawn chair. I think it's important, too, for adults to relearn the usefulness of "no". Any kid who's never heard the word can't say it to himself when he's 16 and walking down a dark street with no one to distract him and notices some adult has left the keys dangling from the ignition of an off-road vehicle.