No. Let him work at McDonald’s. The point is, he is living up a family tradition of mooching.
I say let him pay for school.
I don’t mind a young gentleman taking his meals with our family. I don’t even mind him having a room in our house. The point is, there is a thick, heavy, well-defined line between mooching and just taking a room and meals from a family. Maybe it’s different in your part of the country. That’s not the way it’s done here. But then again, moochers get short shrift around here.
It don’t take a genius to figure out if you’re being mooched off of. Reading your post, I can’t tell what side of the issue you’re coming down on.
I only mean that a person who can obtain a job cannot always earn the necessities, let alone learn the necessities on their own, particularly with only a high school education and essentially no home domestic training in childhood. This isn’t a young man who’s had the basics modelled for him or expected of him while he was growing up. Throwing him into the work force and expecting him to prosper would be as if Kieko the whale had been dumped directly from his little pool in Mexico and straight into the North Atlantic with the instructions: “You’re a killer whale. When you get hungry enough, you’ll figure it out.”
Besides, in some housing markets it is not necessarily possible to get enough hours at McDonald’s to live. A work ethic and the will to make one’s own way is a necessity, but it is not necessarily sufficient. I don’t know about McDonald’s, but there are a lot of service jobs that make it essentially impossible to make ends meet, particularly for someone who starts out with no car, no furnishings, no housewares, no skills, no means of buying affordable health care, no nothing. It can cost a lot of money to get started on a frugal and self-sufficient life! After all, in some areas, rentals do not even come with refrigerators! It is not likely that this young man knows how to shop sensibly or how to cook from scratch, either. Furthermore, the “friend” such a one is most likely to wind up with is a co-habitation arrangement, which is also not a great thing to encourage.
Yes, he ought to pay for his own school. He ought to find work, if it is available, even if it doesn’t pay anything. When he’s not at work, he ought to expect to help with the routine jobs around the home. This is not just because that’s only fair. It is because that is how a mature adult lives. If he is willing to work to obtain work experience, though, it is far better that he starts out in a home with adults who can show him how responsible adults run their life. That is invaluable training, and it will greatly increase his chances of being ready to be a good husband and father sooner rather than maybe never.
To answer your question, though: If he doesn’t have the will to work, there is no realistic choice but to let him take the consequences he chooses. The sooner he gets to those, the sooner he can get through that lesson and perhaps move on. He has to demonstrate that he gets that, both at work and at home, and keep demonstrating it when it gets boring and perserverence is needed, or there is nothing anyone else can do.
If he has the will to work and improve himself, though, his chances of success will be
far higher if he can find someone established to help him get started. That would be far more likely to have a good ending than simply saying, “You have a job, so get some friends and look out for yourself.” That’s all I mean.
