Parenting Daily

Most schools will be getting out for the summer sometime in the next month. If you’re a lucky parent, you’ve been blessed with a teen who is excited to have a summer job (or maybe has had one all school year!). Other teens are dreaming of staying up all night and sleeping all day.

No matter what kind of teen you’ve got, you may be slightly nervous about all the unstructured time that goes along with summer time. Most teens are too old for daycares, sitters, and day camps. Perhaps they have some summer sports camps planned or training for fall sports, but these don’t usually fill up those Mondays through Fridays all summer long.

So if you’d like to start (or continue) your teen on the path to responsible and productive adulthood, getting a summer job is one way to do that. Even a part-time job of just 1-2 days a week adds some beneficial structure to a teen’s summer. At least on those days, they will need to be practicing planning their schedule for the day—what time do I need to get up, do my chores, see my friends, eat meals, etc. This is also great practice for if your teen decides to go to college some day. Mom and Dad aren’t going to be there to wake them up every day so they need to learn how to do it on their own if they haven’t already.

Part-time work has other benefits that you may not think about. It gives them another set of policies and rules that they have to learn and use. By this point in their lives, they pretty much know what’s expected of them at home and at school… but the work force can have a completely unknown set of variables for a teen. Learning how to interact professionally with customers, using registers, working for multiple bosses (many retail and fast food environments will have multiple assistant managers so your teen may work for someone different every shift), learning to think and adapt to unpredictable situations on their feet, etc.

If nothing else, you can usually appeal to most teens’ desire to have a little cash for the rest of their summer activities.

Stay tuned—teens and summer jobs will be an ongoing series throughout the summer months.

Find out about Youth’s Rights in the Workplace here.

A great job search site for finding hourly employment by zip code is here.

Jobs in fun locations can be found here.

And another site for finding summer jobs can be found here.

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