Working a menial job for money does not teach children anything they can’t learn in school. Instead, explains David Owen, author of The First National Bank of Dad, it prevents development gained from joining other activities.
Teenagers are often eager to hold after-school jobs — five million American teenagers currently do so — and their parents often encourage them. Teenagers’ social lives can be expensive, and parents generally feel relieved when their kids demonstrate an inclination to take financial responsibility. In addition, parents often feel that the initiative associated with seeking and holding a real job is just exactly what their kids need, from the standpoint of personal growth. Corporate executives, in their ghostwritten autobiographies, often attribute at least part of their adult success to the discipline they acquired, after school, as newspaper deliverers, grocery-store baggers, filling-station attendants, and the like. (Oddly, though, they seldom seem to have acquired enough discipline to write their own books all by themselves. Why is that?)
I think such feelings are usually misguided. I believe that unless a family’s financial situation forces all hands to contribute, children should not be allowed to hold regular jobs outside of school during the school year. I’m unbothered by occasional, flexible moneymaking opportunities — like weekend baby-sitting assignments, say, or intermittent weekend caddying jobs, or cleaning of the dog run — but I think that true steady employment for high-school students is almost always a mistake.
The main reason for prohibiting children from holding regular after-school jobs can be stated in roughly economic terms: A child’s waking hours are limited, and the most profitable place to invest them, both short term and long term, is in education, broadly conceived. I would much rather have found one of my teenaged children, after school, lying on the couch and reading a book than taking orders from the drive-through window at Wendy’s. All the virtues that children supposedly acquire from holding menial after-school jobs (punctuality, responsibility, stick-to-itiveness, satisfaction in a job well done) can be acquired just as readily, and far more profitably and enjoyably, at school. Acting in a play, taking photographs for the yearbook, playing on a team, or studying for a test will have a bigger influence on a kid’s adult character than will pumping gas or bagging groceries.
In my own case, working on school publications actually turned out to be pretty good preparation for my grown-up career. As a teenager, I never could have found a paying job that provided as much genuine on-the-job training as did editing various school publications or writing a regular newspaper column. So my main extracurricular activities, though unpaid, made a real long-term financial contribution to my life. They were also fun, and they constituted an important part of my adolescent social life.
Bad jobs are mentally exhausting. How sharp would you have been at work today if you had stayed out till eleven last night making french fries? I know teenagers who work thirty or forty hours a week in addition to going to school. They make lots of money, to be sure, and they drive nice cars, but they can’t possibly have enough energy left after work to pay much attention when they’re in class. The New Yorker cartoonist George Booth once told me that he held a full-time job in a printing shop when he was a high-school student, in rural Missouri, and that he sometimes worked all night and went directly to school from the printing shop without stopping off at home. He taught himself to sleep sitting up with his eyes open, so that he could catch up on his rest in class. For all the good he got from those classes, he might as well have been at home in bed.
Teenagers like jobs because jobs generate income, and income generates stuff. Parents tend to feel proud and impressed when their kids become the actual employees of other adults, but most parents would be less pleased if their kids described the inevitable trade-off in a different way: “I’ve decided that I would rather have a new stereo and a B in English than my old stereo and an A.” That’s the bargain that working teenagers are really striking. Does it make any kind of sense, economic or otherwise?
Even if you make after-school employment contingent upon your children’s success at maintaining some predetermined grade-point average, the kids are still missing out. If they can bus tables twenty hours a week and still make the honor roll, they aren’t taking challenging enough courses, or they aren’t auditioning for enough plays. (The only exception, I would say, would be the case of a kid who manages to find an after-school job that complements his or her main academic or extracurricular interest — the way Doogie Howser did.)
If you remain unconvinced that most after-school work experience has little value in the long run, push the argument to its extreme. Imagine two children, one of whom drops out of high school in order to work fulltime at McDonald’s (and thereby gain the maximum possible character enhancement provided by menial employment), and the other of whom stays in high school, takes Advanced Placement courses, plays field hockey, writes for the literary magazine, and earns good grades. Which child is more likely to grow up to be a content, interesting, disciplined, and prosperous working adult?
Truly taking advantage of all the potential benefits of secondary education — including classroom work, homework, sports, clubs, and extracurricular activities — requires a time commitment that adds up to far more than forty hours a week. Kids who “just” go to school aren’t slacking off, as long as they’re making a reasonably conscientious effort to take advantage of those once-in-a- lifetime opportunities. No student who has a job that consumes forty, thirty, twenty, or even ten hours a week in addition to going to school can possibly be receiving the fullest possible benefit from his or her education. A student who forgoes a chance to play varsity soccer in order to take a financially unnecessary after-school job at 7-Eleven is making a poor trade.
Kids who work long hours after school are also usually giving up what turns out to be, for many people, the most memorable single component of adolescence: the amorphous but emotionally all-consuming social life of the average teenager. Hanging out with friends, going on dates, endlessly talking on the telephone, and instant messaging late into the night should not be considered frivolous luxuries: they’re a big part of what adolescence is all about. When grown-ups think back longingly about their teenage years, those are the kinds of things that bring tears to their eyes. Why allow your kids to deny themselves the same old-fogeyish joys?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Owen is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a contributing editor to Golf Digest, for which he writes a monthly humor column. He is the author of The First National Bank of Dad (Copyright © 2003 by David Owen), as well as The Chosen One, The Making of the Masters, and My Usual Game. He lives with his family in northwest Connecticut.
MORE ARTICLES BY THE AUTHOR
LEARN MORE
- Read Chapter 1 of The First National Bank of Dad: A Foolproof Method for Teaching Your Kids the Value of Money
- See the book’s Table of Contents
- Browse more books by David Owen
