‘Tis the season for teens to work retail jobs,  but job-seeking teens are not as common as they used to be. The Houston Chronicle reports:
In 2006, 43.7 percent of teens nationwide between the ages of 16 and 19 were working or looking for work, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s down from 52 percent in 2000.
. . . “I think a lot of parents had a summer job, but the boomer mentality is that we want it to be easier for our kids than it was for us,” said Jason Dorsey, the Austin author of My Reality Check Bounced! Dorsey, who lectures on generational differences at work, said many baby boomers define success as making sure their own kids don’t have to work as hard as they did.
High-achieving teens are loaded up with sports, extracurriculars and community service activities designed to impress college admissions officers. They’re working hard. I’m not so sure about the middle and low achievers. They probably could learn a lot from working for a demanding boss.
Quoting from the article:
“Boomers became responsible adults because they were forced to work for everything they got,”
How often do you see the words ‘Boomer’, ‘responsible’ and ‘adults in the same sentence?
To say nothing of “Boomer” and “work”.
I’m not really a fan of teens in school working. While I know that there are occasional part time jobs that can give teens some responsibility and thus teach them useful skills, those are few and far between in the current job market. Most of the jobs teens are able to get are the jobs available to people without high school diplomas and only teach skills useful to people who have jobs that don’t require a high school diploma.
There’s really not that much that you learn from fast food jobs, retail jobs, or jobs selling tickets at the movie theater. They do pay, of course, and that was the point – but in terms of preparation for the real job market, they did very little, and I – aside from the fact that I needed the money – I would have been better off spending the summer reading and hanging out with my peers.
Balderdash. An important component of any job is just showing up, a habit hardly developed hanging with friends, as a trip through any ghetto can demonstrate. You aren’t my nephew Peter, are you?
As always, people foolishly think that teens have changed when in fact the job market has. Who would hire a teenager when they can get an illegal or barely legal who will work all hours and not need time off for school?
There are plenty of studies showing that the teen employment market’s health is inversely related to the immigrant (illegal or not) employment in the same market.
True, Cal – in the interest of protecting children we have cut them off from lots of opportunities. I doubt that many 11 year olds get up at 4AM to deliver papers as I did at that age.
The comments of Walter Wallis and Cal resonate.
I suspect a lot of the problem is, middle-class kids simply don’t want to work among the great unwashed who speak only or mainly Spanish, for instance. That means most of the fast-food jobs.
One of the problems of the current cultural paradigm seems to be, you only get — or stay with — a job in a fast-food restaurant (among many other coming-of-age jobs if you are a native Spanish-speaker.
Another problem is the lack of seriously well-paying jobs for high school- and college-aged kids in most urban areas.
I speak from experiance. I live in Silicon Valley, and attended college before it was Silicon Valley. In those days, a huge amount of summer money could be made thru hard work.
In my case, it was loading trucks and rail cars in a cannery, six days, 48 hours, per week, throwing 40- to 75-pound cases. I got thru college that way, along with a great number of other jobs.
What do kids do now, if, as in my situation, there was no financial support coming from home?
Bill