Since my oldest daughter turned 16 this year, my wife Shirley and I have been nagging her to get a part time job. We assume that she should be making some of her own money. After all, both my wife and I worked when we were her age and many kids her age have part time jobs. Shouldn’t she, too? Maybe not.
Stats Canada reported in 2007 that about 65 per cent of high school kids in Canada have part time jobs. According to the survey, Canadian kids work more than teens in nine other European and North American countries surveyed. An average Canadian teen’s workday – including class time, school homework, chores, employment and volunteering – was just under ten hours.
Following from the Stats Canada survey, Jorgen Hansen, an associate professor of economics at Montreal’s Concordia University, studied a cohort of students over several years and found that students’ part time jobs in fact negatively affect school grades. Hansen compared work and grade-point averages and concluded that the more students work, the greater the harm to their grades. He also found that the younger in age the more harm incurred. In announcing the findings, Hansen said, “I’m a parent myself [and] I would not encourage my kids to work.”
Hansens’s conclusions, published in 2009, are backed up by earlier studies such as one published in The Journal of Human Resources by Donna Rothstein of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Rothstein concluded “High school employment and its lag have small, negative impacts on academic grade point average for both males and females.”
In addition, Stats Canada found that “Older teens [have] more stress indicators than younger teens, since the last year of high school (or first year of postsecondary schooling) is often more difficult than the first years of high school, and the need for good marks is crucial.”
With the competitiveness for university enrollment and our own emphasis on “doing your best in school” coupled with the findings of these studies, I’m second-guessing our assumption that a student job is a good and necessary thing.
What do you think? As your teenage children get ready to go back to school are they going to be working part time?
About 
I'm in my first year of university. I've been working part-time since grade 10 and I can somewhat see the point in this article. However it really depends. For example, from grades 10-12, I worked only on sundays, from 10am-6pm. I actually found this to be a good thing, because before that, I would waste my weekends and do all my homework on sunday. However, with the job, I was forced to do homework on friday and saturday and I could still make some money and gain experience with my job.
But now, I have taken on a much more fun, yet time-consuming part time job. Also, as I am in my first year of university, it is now becoming a delicate balancing act. I am finding it hard to have time to do other things, barely being able to finish my regular schoolwork. I know that nothing comes before school at this point (except family obvs), but I absolutely adore this job.
I think that working for teens is a good idea, depending on the number of hours and flexibility of days. If teens can find the right job that fits in with their schedule I definitely think it is much more beneficial than having no job at all. Where will they get the experience they need later on in life? It is also a good idea to stop being so dependent on parents and to have a little extra money, whether that be used for spending, or to begin to learn to save (a skill which I now value).