On-the-Job Draining

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, by the time they are 17, nearly 40 percent of all American teenagers will be employed during the school year. Conventional wisdom has it that working is good for teens -- it builds character, instills responsibility, teaches time management. Although studies have shown that summer employment is almost always good for kids, virtually all research on adolescent employment during the school year indicates that the same does not hold true for school-year employment.

"Most teenagers have jobs that are dull, monotonous, and often stressful. Our research shows that employed teens tend to express cynical attitudes toward work and endorse unethical business practices," says Dr. Laurence Steinberg, professor of psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia and author of The Ten Basic Principles of Good Parenting (Simon & Schuster, 2004). Among working high schoolers, research shows high rates of job-related misconduct, such as stealing from employers and lying about the number of hours worked.

To be sure, some kids work to contribute to their future success, says Dr. Elizabeth Berger, spokesperson for the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and author of Raising Children with Character (Jason Aronson, 1999). "They use the money to pay for the bus or put gas in their car, save for college, contribute at home. They enhance their identity and self-respect from helping out," says Berger.

Although economic background can impact how work affects them, so too does the type of work kids do.

"Kids who work at certain jobs, especially menial ones, increase their exposure to a whole set of risk behaviors they might otherwise not experience," says Dr. Robert Blum, professor and chair of the department of Population and Family Health Sciences in the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, and past president of the Society for Adolescent Medicine. Substance abuse, early smoking, and precocious sexual behavior are all risks.

And parents are often blind to the issue of where kids are working, says Blum. While some are likely to check out their offspring's school, summer camp, and friends, they may not investigate where their teen spends his working hours. Very often, they've never even visited their child's job site. It's a realm over which parents have little interest and almost no control, says Blum.