Part-Time Work Ethic: Should Teens Go for It?

John Fovos landed his first part-time job--as a box boy at Alpha Beta on West Olympic--the summer after his sophomore year at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles. “I wanted to be independent,” he said, “and I felt it was time for me to see what the world really was like.”

Now an 18-year-old senior, Fovos works the late shift at the supermarket stocking shelves four nights a week. He saves about $50 a week, but most of his paycheck goes to his car payment and membership at a health spa. “The rest is for food--what I don’t eat at home--and clothes.”

Shelley Staats went to work part time as a secretary for a Century 21 office when she was 15. Since then, she has worked as a cashier for a marine products company, scooped ice cream at a Baskin- Robbins, cashiered at a Video Depot and worked as a “floater” at May Co.

The Newport Harbor High School senior currently works about 25 hours a week in the lingerie department at the new Broadway in Costa Mesa. Although she saves about $200 a month for college, she said she works “to support myself: my car and clothes and just stuff I do, like going out.”

Working also has helped her to learn to manage both her time and money, Staats said, and her work in the department store is providing experience for a future career in fashion merchandising.

But, she acknowledged, there are times when working while going to school has taken its toll.

“Last year I was sleeping in my first-period class half the time,” admitted Staats, who occasionally has forgone football games and school dances because of work. “After a while, it just wears you out.”

Nathan Keethe, a Newport Harbor High School senior who works more than 20 hours a week for an exterminating service, admits to sometimes feeling like the odd man out when he sees that fellow students “are out having a good time after school and I’m working. But then I think there’s a lot of other kids out there working, too, and it doesn’t seem so unusual.”

Indeed, what clearly was the exception 40 years ago is now the rule.

Fovos, Staats and Keethe are riding the crest of a wave of part-time student employees that began building at the end of World War II and has steadily increased to the present. In 1981, according to a study by the National Center for Education Statistics, 80% of high school students have held part-time jobs by the time they graduate.

Viewed as Valuable

Part-time work during the school years traditionally has been viewed as an invaluable experience for adolescents, one that builds character, teaches responsibility and prepares them for entering the adult world.

But the authors of a provocative new book challenge conventional wisdom, contending that an over-commitment to work during the school years “may make teenagers economically wealthy but psychologically poor.”

The book, “When Teen-agers Work: The Psychological and Social Costs of Adolescent Employment” (Basic Books), is by Ellen Greenberger, a developmental psychologist and professor of social ecology at UC Irvine, and Laurence Steinberg, a professor of child and family studies at the University of Wisconsin.

Based on national research data and on the authors’ own study of more than 500 working and non-working students at four Orange County high schools, the book reports that:

- Extensive part-time employment during the school year may undermine youngsters’ education. Students who work long hours are more likely to cut back on courses at school, taking easier classes and avoiding tougher ones. And, say the authors, long hours of work begun early in the school years increase the likelihood of dropping out.

- Working leads less often to the accumulation of savings or financial contributions to the family than to a higher level of spending on cars, clothes, stereos, concerts and other luxury items.

- Working appears to promote, rather than deter, some forms of delinquent behavior. About 30% of the youngsters in their first part-time job have given away goods or services; 18% have taken things other than money from work; 5 1/2% have taken money from work; and 17% have worked under the influence of drugs or alcohol, according to the Orange County study.

- Working long hours under stressful conditions leads to increased alcohol and marijuana use.

- Teen-age employment--typically in dull or monotonous jobs for which the sole motivation is the paycheck--often leads to increased cynicism about working.

Maturity Deterrent Moreover, the authors contend that adolescents who work long hours may develop the superficial social skills of an adult but by devoting too much time to a job they severely curtail the time needed for reflection, introspection and identity experimentation that is required to develop true maturity.

Such findings lead Greenberger and Steinberg to conclude “that the benefits of working to the development of adolescents have been overestimated, while the costs have been underestimated.”

“We don’t want to be read as saying that kids shouldn’t work during the school year,” Greenberger said in an interview. “Our argument is with over-commitment to work: that working long hours may interfere with other very important goals of the growing years.”

The authors place the blame partly on the types of jobs available to young people today. By working in unchallenging, monotonous jobs in fast-food restaurants or retail shops, they contend, teen-agers learn few new skills, have little opportunity for meaningful contact with adults and seldom gain work experience that will lead to future careers.

“Parents and schools,” Greenberger said, “should wake up from the dream that having a kid who works 30 hours a week is promoting his or her transition to adulthood.”

Largest Employer

Greenberger and Steinberg’s findings, not surprisingly, do not sit well with the fast-food industry.

“The fast-food industry is probably the largest employer of young people in the United States,” said Paul Mitchell, spokesman for Carl Karcher Enterprises, which employs thousands of teen-agers in its Carl’s Jr. restaurants.

“For most of those young people,” Mitchell said, “it’s their first job, the first time they are told that you make a product a certain way, the first time they work with money, the first time they are made aware to be there on time and do it right . . . and it’s just a tremendous working experience.”

Terry Capatosto, a spokeswoman for McDonald’s, calls Greenberger and Steinberg’s findings “absurd, to say the least.”

“Working at McDonald’s contributes tremendously to (young people’s) personal development and work ethic,” said Capatosto, noting that countless McDonald’s alumnae have gone on to professional careers and that about half of the people at all levels of McDonald’s management, including the company’s president and chairman of the board, started out as crew people.

“The whole idea of getting students out in the community during the time they’re also a student is a very productive thing to do,” said Jackie Oakes, college and career guidance specialist at Santa Ana High School.

Although she feels most students work “for the extras kids want,” Oakes said they work for a variety of reasons, including earning money to go on a trip with the school band and saving for college.

Time Away From Study?

As for work taking time away from studying, Oakes said, “I think if a kid isn’t interested in studying, having a job doesn’t impact that.”

Newport Harbor High School’s Nathan Keethe, who usually earns Bs, doesn’t think he’d devote more time to schoolwork if he weren’t working. “Not really, because even when I wasn’t working I wasn’t too devoted to school,” he said, adding that “for somebody who is, I wouldn’t recommend working too much. I do think it would interfere.”

Fairfax High’s John Fovos, who works about 27 hours a week, however, said his grade-point average actually has risen since he began working part time. The motivation? “My parents told me if my job hindered my grades, they’d ask me to quit,” he said.

“The key is they have to learn time management: when to study, when to play and when to work,” observed Mimi Birch, career education coordinator at Newport Harbor High School, adding that “I monitor their grades because anyone failing in another subject will be asked to drop the program because we feel academics are more important than holding a job.”

Greenberger emphasizes that she and Steinberg “are not talking about work-study programs that are sponsored by the school. We’re talking about what we call employment in the naturally occurring workplace--the kinds of jobs that kids find themselves and that are unsupervised and unmonitored by the schools.”

“On the other hand,” Greenberger added, “studies of work experience programs generally have rather dismal results with respect to: What do kids learn? Do they become more responsible? Do they become more independent? Those results look quite a lot like the results for these kinds of jobs.”

Greenberger said the idea for the study occurred to her in the late ‘70s when she “realized the local world, at least as portrayed by the retail sector, seemed to be run entirely by teen-aged kids.”

‘Tremendous Rate of Increase’

Government statistics, which Greenberger believes underreport the extent of youth work, show that the number of working boys aged 16 to 17 years old rose from 27% in 1947 to 44% in 1980. Over that same period, the number of working schoolgirls increased 2 1/2 times, from 17% to 41%, which, Greenberger noted, “is a tremendous rate of increase and probably mirrors to some extent the increased participation of adult women in the labor force.”

Greenberger cites several reasons for the rise in the employment of school-going youngsters, including increasing job opportunities for people with relatively low levels of skill as a result of the tremendous growth of the retail and service sectors. And, she said, an increase in youngsters’ tastes for luxury goods over the past decade fueled their desire to take these jobs.

“Our colleague, Jerald Bachman at the University of Michigan, uses the term ‘premature affluence’ to describe the condition many working youngsters find themselves in and he says it’s premature because, in fact, it’s a level of spending that youngsters aren’t going to be able to maintain once they get out of the family household and have to start paying for some of the big expenses of living like rent and food,” she said.

A general decline in the value placed on the importance of education also has contributed to the influx of students into the labor force, according to Greenberger.

“As part of that trend, we have schools requiring less homework, making less demanding assignments of kids and, once again, youngsters finding it more possible than they once did to combine going to school with going to the job.”

Although she acknowledges that some teen-age workers may experience growth in such areas as self-reliance and improved work habits, Greenberger said, “it’s not evident that those things couldn’t be realized in other settings as well. There’s no evidence that you have to be a teen-age drone in order to grow in those areas.”

And for youngsters in certain kinds of jobs, she said, there may be “growth in what we call social understanding or social insight. And there we would point to jobs in which youngsters actually have a high degree of interaction with other people: They have to use their own wits, vocabulary and judgment, not the sort of robot talk that you hear out of the loudspeaker at the fast-food place.”

The Bad News

As for the notion that “it would be great to get kids out into the workplace because they’ll learn,” Greenberger said that “the news is not so good.”

“On the one hand we find that relatively little time on the job is spent using anything resembling higher-order cognitive skills,” she said. “Computation nowadays is often done automatically by the cash register, so so much for practicing arithmetic. Kids do extremely little writing and reading (on the job). There’s also very little job training. In fact, most of the youngsters in our survey reported their job could be done by somebody with a grade-school education or less.”

In their book, Greenberger and Steinberg devote a chapter on how to improve the adolescent work experience. Among their suggestions, in addition to limiting the number of working hours, are that parents should monitor their children’s employment more carefully, schools should integrate adolescents’ work experiences into course work, and employers should improve the job experience for youth by providing greater variety on the job such as offering young employees a chance to learn how the organization operates by occasionally including them in low-level management meetings.

Greenberger noted that summer jobs pose fewer conflicts than do school-year jobs and if students do work during the school year she suggests they limit school-week employment by shifting their work hours to the weekend.

She also recommends that instead of seeking paid part-time jobs, students should be “exploring some real possibilities for the future. This may involve being willing to volunteer your time because you don’t have the skills to warrant being paid for hanging around a computer facility, or a lab or whatever, to get a sense of what these people do.”

For all the talk about what the work place does or does not provide for part-time student employees, no mention was made of what young workers sometimes have to offer to a job: youthful enthusiasm.

John Fovos talks about “the challenge” of stocking more than 130 cases of grocery items during his eight-hour shift at Alpha Beta.

Meeting the Challenge

“For me to do it in the time asked of me, it’s something that’s hard to do,” he said, adding that when the job is done, “you leave work in a good mood. I have never left work in a bad mood, even if it’s been a big day. Very rarely don’t I meet the challenge.”

Li-Fen Chen, a Belmont High School senior who works as a cashier at a McDonald’s in downtown Los Angeles, puts it even more simply.

Asked if working 35 hours a week while going to school and maintaining a B average in such classes as trigonometry and American literature ever seems like too much, the China-born 17-year-old laughed shyly and said, “No.”

“I like to work; that’s why.”