Employment

Most American teenagers work for pay; figures vary depending on whether labor force participation is measured at a particular point in time or over the course of several years. A U.S. Department of Education survey published in 2000 found two-thirds of twelfth graders saying that they worked for pay; other research asking high school students if they have ever worked has yielded even higher figures.

Beginning in the 1980s, researchers have increasingly paid attention to this phenomenon. Yet rather than exploring the reasons for the high incidence of youth employment, for the most part researchers have engaged in a study and debate of the costs and benefits to American youth of their working. Much of the literature has focused on whether working has detrimental effects on young people's engagement in school and academic outcomes, as well as youth's social and psychological development. While some studies have found a negative relationship between the number of hours worked during the school year and school attainment measures, David Stern and Derek Briggs's review of the literature concluded that students who work moderate hours perform better in school than students who work extensively or not at all.

In addition, some of the research is not able to fully sort out the direction of causality, for example, whether students with lower grade point averages tend to work more hours or whether working lowers the grades. Thus negative effects could be due to selection, that is, the possibility that students who are already not engaged in school choose to work more. In The Ambitious Generation, Barbara Schneider and David Stevenson report their findings that youth generally enjoy working more than they enjoy being in school.

There has been surprisingly little research examining why youth work, or why many work quite long hours. Youth employment has tended to be studied after the fact, rather than examining reasons or motivations leading to employment. That high school students have part-time jobs has come to be seen as the norm, likely due to the American cultural emphasis on occupation as a primary component of identity, and appreciation for work ethic and entrepreneurship. American youth do tend to start working earlier and work more than youth in other countries. And research has found that adults have quite positive retrospective views of their own early jobs, as well as favorable attitudes about their children's employment.

Some researchers speculate that the motivation for working is entirely financial, as it has been estimated that 54 percent of American youth receive no allowance, as reported by James R. Stone III and Jeylan T. Mortimer in 1998. Certainly American youth require money to participate in the automobile culture and buy the consumer goods that are significant parts of society. Hence, youth do tend to give the reason for working as "to buy things," according to Mortimer and colleagues in a report published in 1990. Teenagers from poor families in particular need to work so that they have money with which to participate in youth culture. Poor and immigrant youth also tend to share their earnings with their families. And some teenagers work primarily to save money for college, which appears to have positive effects on several outcome measures such as the likelihood of attending college and educational aspirations.

There are other reasons for working aside from monetary gain. Researchers have found that some young people seem to have an internal drive towards working; they like to be occupied by productive activity. In 2000 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Barbara Schneider reported that the young people they studied who spent the most time working perceived work more positively than young people who worked less, and saw work as important to themselves and to their future. Finally, the young fast-food workers in Harlem that Katherine S. Newman reported about in No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City needed income but also sought work in order to have a safe, structured place to go, away from the pressures of street violence.

In keeping with the idea that paid employment is the norm for American youth, researchers have examined why some youth do not work. It is well-established that work experience is more common among upper socioeconomic status and white teenagers. Most experts believe that this is due to a lack of employment opportunities for poorer youth, rather than less desire for work. According to Csikszentmihalyi and Schneider's Becoming Adult: How Teenagers Prepare for the World of Work (2000), upper class youth are more likely to work during the summer than during the school year, however, likely reflecting a concern about work interfering with studies. However, the minority youth in this study had a more positive view of work than the other young people.

Based on the types of jobs American youth tend to hold, it is unlikely that they are working in order to learn about possible adult career fields. Young people's first paid jobs tend to be informal (or "freelance jobs," as the U.S. Department of Labor refers to them), such as child care and lawn work. As youth progress into their mid-teens, the majority work in retail, which includes eating and drinking establishments such as fast-food restaurants. Even affluent teenagers tend to hold jobs, such as camp counseling and life guarding, that they are not likely to pursue as career fields. To remedy this situation, the 1990s saw a renewed emphasis on school-sponsored work-based learning, particularly through the 1994 School-to-Work Opportunities Act. Research on work opportunities offered through school has found that those positions tend to be in a wider range of industries and tend to more closely match students' career goals. Advocates hope that youth can gain more than money from their employment experiences.