My wife and I are DINKs, but something I realized yesterday with all of our friends who have teenage children: None of them have a part-time job, not a single one. And none of their pre-teen kids have any unofficial jobs like mowing lawns either.
Not pointing that out to judge, rather my curiosity in understanding if this is an intentional thing and/or what is the cause of the shift. I'm not even trying to state whether it's a good or bad thing, just making an observation with an open mind to the reasons and factors at play.
I've asked the question and apparently its a mixture of:
letting kids be kids and not making them have too much financial responsibility
part time minimum wage not being enough to pay for car insurance or a car like we were able to
college becoming more and more competitive and kids needing more available time to focus on studies and extra curriculum activities to stay competitive
Mmmm ok butttttt we also have a generation of kids with increased social anxieties. I was a shy kid but my part time job forced me to get over that whether I was ready or not. I also had to respect a schedule and couldn't just quit because I wanted off for whatever reason. Either i traded shifts or sucked it up. But work with other teens my age was also fun.
You also have the chaos of scheduling, ie managers who do not care that they are still in high-school and schedule accordingly. Like finals exist, papers and homework exist. I dont know, I want to say that we made it work when we were their age but I don't think the people managing us or scheduling us were as petty as they are today.
The thing is I remember being the person responsible for finding coverage "that's the managers job" was NOT a thing when I was back in high school working my part time job. I remember having to ask my colleagues to swap with me. I also used to work alot of 5-9pm shifts...getting home at 9pm on a school night is crazy when I think about it now. I remember having to cram my homework in the 2 hours I was home before changing and walking to work.
In my case I really did just make it work... having a test was my problem to figure out when to study for... my parents didn't really ask much or knew how I was doing in school as long as I was passing. They didn't have the online portals like we do today.
I worked at a grocery store when I was in HS. Worked from 4-10 4 nights a week and an 8 hour shift on Sunday. I did my homework on the bus and in class. Made a lot of money selling my classmates bottles of awful booze for 3x the shelf price though haha.
I did buy myself a car and didn't have any debt after college, don't think that's possible nowadays.
Graduated in 2003, and I usually ended up cramming my hours into weekend shifts. But that's also because I had shit going on during the week too. Sports, music lessons, and somehow still had time to blow off homework to go hang out with people.
I used to manage a staff of mostly teenagers and part of my job was collecting availability and not scheduling the highschool students for work while they were in school or super late on weeknights (past 10pm). I also put exam weeks and breaks on my calendar so I knew when I'd have to cover shifts and when there'd be a lot of availability.
I thought it was weird that other managers would make people cover their own shifts if something came up. I had the list of everyone's phone numbers, a phone, and I was on the clock. Making phone calls was easier than cleaning or dealing with the public.
When I was a teenager, my boss for my part-time job was also doing that part-time, and her main job was as a school teacher, so she was very understanding of all of us prioritizing school. I didn't realize until later how lucky I was with that kind of arrangement and how fucked over so many people were.
Where we previously lived, it seemed like no teenagers had jobs. Anecdotally, I heard that the types of places we worked in high school didn’t want to hire teenagers and pay them minimum wage (~$20/hr). I don’t know how much it was that or the kids already being way overscheduled and parents just giving them money vs. encouraging them to want to save and earn it themselves.
We’re fortunate to be pretty comfortable, but my daughter was always interested in earning her own money. Where we moved to, it’s common for teens to get jobs,
even the pretty well-off ones. She’s excited to get a job when she can.
I can only speak to where I live, but all the "teenager jobs" are filled by adults right now. Every server and cashier in my town that I've encountered is at least mid-20's, and almost all of them are women. So many of the moms at the elementary school pickup area are women who I recognize as waitresses from around town. I've noticed an increase in older women in these positions, too. Social security not going as far as it used to, I assume. We have a lot of locally owned businesses, which is great, but I've noticed they're staffed by the owners and maybe one or two family members. None of them seem to hire people to work there.
I think one of the core issues is that our society is less neighborly than it was. Mowing the neighbor's lawn means talking to the neighbor, and broadly speaking that is a thing people don't do anymore. We're becoming individualist to an isolationist degree, so teenagers no longer have that community support to hold weird teenager jobs.
A lot of the teenager-specific jobs are also being automated away. Oregon for many years maintained the "no self-serve gas" laws purely because it created a job that highschoolers could do, but that's gone now. There are simply less possible jobs for them to work, and that's a lot of it.
Then factor in how hard the job market is right now, and a lot of jobs that would traditionally go to teenagers have people in their 40s working them because they need the money, and so the opportunities just aren't there.
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u/___Art_Vandelay___ 7h ago
My wife and I are DINKs, but something I realized yesterday with all of our friends who have teenage children: None of them have a part-time job, not a single one. And none of their pre-teen kids have any unofficial jobs like mowing lawns either.
Not pointing that out to judge, rather my curiosity in understanding if this is an intentional thing and/or what is the cause of the shift. I'm not even trying to state whether it's a good or bad thing, just making an observation with an open mind to the reasons and factors at play.