For parents of teenagers headed into the trades

Your teenager has said they are not going to college. Or they have said they want to do HVAC like your brother-in-law, and you genuinely cannot tell whether the right reaction is relief or alarm.

Sitting under that reaction are four questions that do have real answers. Is this work going to hurt him. Is it a career or a corner he cannot get out of. What is it going to cost us. And what is a sixteen year old even permitted to do on a job site. Most of what comes back from a search either dodges those or settles them with a figure somebody invented.

Here, the answer comes first and the reasoning comes after it, so you can stop reading whenever you have what you came for. Every number names the agency that published it and the period it was measured over, and the top of every page says when the sources behind it were last read.