comment: >
  
  
  We are only kids once and I hate the fact that so much of it is wasted working. Looking back, how many nights a week did you give up or weekends did you give up so that you could work? And make minimum wage.
  
  I gave up entire years of my life working. First raising my siblings and taking care of my mother and running her business, then as the siblings grew more independent working actual jobs to help pay bills and put food on the table. 
  
  I know a lot of people will say that poor families sometimes require the extra income, I don’t have a real rebuttal to that except how incredibly sad that is. But I may have a solution.
  
  This solution doesn't work. You only say to limit the hours I could have worked to five hours a week by law by official businesses. However, I rarely worked for an 'official business'. Most of what I outlined above was literal babysitting and doing things like mowing lawns and other forms of help that paid 'under the table'. Only when my younger siblings were old enough to mostly care for themselves did I get into any 'official business' and by then I was already seventeen/eighteen years old, so that 'limit me to five hours a week by law' wouldn't have helped at all. 
  All your solution does is say that instead of letting businesses exploit poor kids or kids in difficult situations and pay them only minimum wage, let's let private individuals and under-the-table businesses exploit them for often LESS than minimum wage with far less oversight and protection in the workplace than actual businesses can offer. 
  Your solution only makes it harder and more exploitative for kids and families in poverty.
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  So you’re solution to high schoolers working to much is for them to keeping working just do it under the table so on paper their working less than 5 hours a week? >
  
  um.. what happens to teenagers forced to support themselves, who are now legally unable to do so? sounds like a surefire way to get desperate teenagers to do unsafe and illegal things for money. >
  
  Maybe I’m super ignorant but how many teenagers are able to support themselves and be in high school? No one can live off minimum wage- especially if you can’t work full time. >
  
  
  No one can live off minimum wage
  
  Lol, what do you mean? Tons of people live on minimum wage. >
  
  Without government assistance? >
  
  Yes. >
  
  Oh gotcha. Where I live in America minimum wage would land you under 18K which would secure you government assistance. And that’s assuming a high schooler can find a job that schedule allows them to work around a school schedule >
  
  I live in the US too, I don't qualify for government assistance for not being American, I lived on federal minimum wage for years, and now work with many people in that same situation. >
  
  Oh gotcha, good point I didn’t think about!
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