Summertime Blues for Teens Who Want To Work

I just came across a story on Slate.com that said only one out of every four American teenagers has a summer job this year. That’s a drop from what seems like the summer job heyday between the 1950s and the 1990s, when the teen employment rate was anywhere from 45 to 60 percent, according to the story. And now the rate “has plummeted to the lowest level since the government started keeping tabs after World War II,” Slate reporter Annie Lowrey writes.

The possible reasons listed in the story to explain this trend include the fact maybe kids don’t want to work, preferring instead to take an unpaid internship or study. More than half of American teens are enrolling in summer school, what some say shows an increased emphasis on the importance of academics. There is also stiff competition from adults these days for any job—even those paying minimum wage, that in pre-recession days may have been the exclusive realm of teen workers.

My own kids are so young that I can’t fathom what kind of summer job they’ll have someday, if only because that’s what I did. I had several summer jobs as a teenager, first as a babysitter for my cousins, then briefly as a cashier at a hardware store. In college, I would work for about a month after coming back home at a local menswear store during prom and wedding season, helping with its busy tuxedo rental service until Memorial Day weekend. That’s when my job as a lifeguard at a local beach would kick in. Hands down, that was my all-time favorite job. Yes, it held a great deal of responsibility, but it was also outside in the sun and it paid more than minimum wage.

When we weren’t up in the chair blowing our whistles at sand-throwers and keeping our eye on swimmers in general, part of our job was to keep the park clean, picking up trash and cleaning restrooms. I think everyone should have to have a job where they have to clean up after other people at least once in their lives, particularly when they are young. I’m happy to no longer be doing that, of course, but I know it taught me to have more respect for my surroundings, and certainly for the people whose job it is to keep them tidy and safe.

The Slate story points out another disturbing statistic: the youth unemployment rate, meaning the kids who want jobs but can’t find them. That figure is 24 percent, and it’s even higher—more than 40 percent—for black teenagers. As the story points out, studies show that being out of work as a young person tends to snowball into unemployment and lower wages later in life.

Teaching our children responsibility and a greater sense of the world around them is an excellent reason to encourage them to take a summer job, assuming they can find one.