The part-time job perplex.

One of the odder things about April is that unlike hockey player Mike and figure skater Liz, she didn't have any sort of real extracurricular activities to put on her application for university. Aside from that damned garage band, she had no after school activities because her idiot mother made her report in to that damned book store because once again, panicky moron Elly assumes that "kid in house alone = total destruction" because she simply cannot bring herself to trust her kids. While Mike was the idiot who did come up with the idea, it's probably one Elly would have come up with on her own anyhow.

This is because it's highly likely that the reason putting April to work was so damned easy is that Jim and Marian did that to Elly as a teenager. We have in Marian a parent who probably assumed that learning good work habits would be better for Elly than 'gadding about and getting into mischief' (that's limey half-wit for 'developing social skills') and in Jim yet another male with a family farm complex who dreamed futile dreams of keeping his business in the family. It would have made a lot of sense to both of them to keep Elly from 'doing herself harm' (which means 'finally figuring out how to decipher blazingly obvious social cues') by volunteering her. The end result of the stolen adolescence is what we see now: a frustrated moron who doesn't understand what's going on around her and who makes pious noise about hostile strangers and body language because her Depression kid parents perpetrated the dick move called "grand theft functioning in society."