Jill's story

My name is Jill, I am 23 and have been working as a nanny and doing some babysitting jobs. I have started a Diploma in Children’s Services, and I applied for a full time job in child care.  I didn't get the full time job and so now I have decided to continue with the study.

It’s really hard deciding what to do at my age, I don’t want to do child care forever, its just something I have experience with, and a way for me to earn money so I can be financially independent as I feel bad about being a drain on my parents. I really want to do engineering but I feel like I need to get myself into a position of where I can do that without relying too much on my parents, have my own car and stuff like that.

I feel a lot of pressure and conflict about what I am doing because there’s this kind of standards or milestones that I see a lot of my friends reaching like getting their license and a car, and I feel so far behind that, that’s why I think I’ll just make short term decisions, grab a bit of work so I can get some money so I can do things like get a car. I get confused though since I know completing my course is going to help me money too. The last few years I’ve made a lot of short term decisions and interrupted what I was doing, like a course I dropped, so I can try and start something else, like I did a cooking course, and then try something else. It’s really hard to make the right decisions because there’s a lot of peer pressure to be successful in other ways.

I find applying for benefits really daunting, mainly because of the amount of paper work. Like the form for youth allowance is so complicated and long, it’s really off-putting but I understand why they need to ask all those questions. My situations a bit weird because of the baby sitting work, it’s really irregular and sporadic, I have no way of predicting income yet, I get treated like someone who is self-employed. Like I could be earning $50 one week, and nothing the next. Recently I decided to apply for Newstart as it had been a while since I had any work, and my parents need me to pay rent. Centrelink gave me an appointment for 2 weeks, but it seems to me like I may have a job by then, so it’s a bit stupid, having to wait so long, when I really needed the money a few weeks back. It’s really off-putting, and knowing I have to go through that process to claim any kind of benefit or support just deters me from going through it.
Since I’m living at home with my parents I had all these doubts about whether I deserve benefits as much as some other people, you know that was another thing that put me off claiming too.

I’m really lucky to have such supportive parents, they are supportive of whatever I decide to do, but even so I feel guilty about relying so much on them.

Yah I did go to an employment service agency once, they were pretty patronizing and the stuff they showed me was pretty basic. I found what they wanted me to do with the job search diary, listing all those job applications, wasn’t really right for what I was doing as I wanted to study to get into child care, and then eventually to move into engineering as I said. But I haven’t had too much to do with them, as I haven’t had to stay on Newstart for too long, mostly something short term comes along and I get off it, if I have even bothered going on it in the first place.

It’s really hard for young people today because the feeling of needing to be successful like some of my peers kind of makes me feel unsuccessful, and I panic and make dumb decisions about my future. Not dumb, I just mean in retrospect they probably weren’t the best decisions for my long term. But when you feel this sense of failure you kind of want to try to something else so you can feel successful,. That’s why I’m trying to build on the child care work ive done, because it’s an area where I feel I have been successful, and it will help me with my confidence which has gone down a lot since I’ve been trying to work out what to do with my future.