Michael Stahl’s career has taken a dramatic turn in his senior year of high school. The former camp counselor, golf course gofer and grocery store sample server has hit the big time as an author and Internet entrepreneur.
Maybe it’s safe to say that Michael Stahl, of the Kansas side of suburban Kansas City, has achieved what any parent would want: He is at the mountaintop of teen employment, doing something at age 18 that very well may become part of his career, and all the while he has maintained excellent grades.
He is about to become a published author, with a book about finance for teens, “Early to Rise: A Young Person’s Guide to Investing … and the Financial Decisions that Can Shape a Lifetime” (Silver Lake Publishing). Plus, he is preparing to spread his Kansas City Internet model, careers4teens.com, to the 50 largest cities in the country. The Web site matches employers with job-hunting teens. And he has done all this before entering the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania this fall.
It’s quite impressive, but even his parents were concerned that his teen jobs would interfere with his eventual adult life, and many parents face the same concerns that troubled the Stahls, who were careful to prevent their son’s labors from interfering with school.
“I don’t want my kid working five hours the night before a big test,” said Lloyd Stahl, Michael’s father, a cardiologist. “Getting a good grade, in the long term, is a lot better than making $5 an hour right now. I wouldn’t let him do it.”
Michael said his earlier, mundane work was limited mostly to weekends, and his father said that though his son’s new enterprises have taken much time, Michael maintained his good academic standing.
Parents’ fears are not unfounded. Child labor laws are meant to do two things: prevent children from being abused through work, of course, but also to make sure their education comes first.
The issue of whether a child should work is one many parents will confront. One analysis of figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that 64 percent of high school juniors and 73 percent of high school seniors work for pay outside the home at least one week during the academic year.
A recent poll of 1,000 Family section readers showed that 74 percent of respondents think jobs for high school students are a good idea, and few people would dispute that a job is preferable to time wasted on extended television watching or video war-gaming.
Yet, even as the tight labor market has made jobs available to teens like never before, there has been a spate of warnings about the damage that too much work can cause teens.
For many soon-to-be high school seniors, this will be the summer that they work, followed by the autumn in which they keep working.
That’s how it happened for Michelle Scott, 18, of Chicago, a senior at Prosser Vocational Career Academy. She started working last summer and liked what a job gave her: independence, a sense of accomplishment, coaching on what to expect in the working world and, of course, money.
But her mother had the same worry as Michael Stahl’s father.
“I didn’t want her to work right away,” said her mom, Mary Scott, “because it takes away from the time they devote to studies. It has made her a little more responsible, and it has helped her realize what she is facing when she gets into the adult world.”
The fact that her daughter is working in an office pleases her mother. Michelle is an intern at the Target Group Inc., a business that operates a program matching teens with job opportunities through Chicago Public Schools.
“If you’re able to manage your schoolwork, then it’s OK to work,” said Michelle, who plans to start college at the University of Illinois at Chicago, hoping to be a surgical nurse. “But do not get it (a job) unless you’re mature enough to handle it.”
Job stress combined with school pressures pushed Rachel Sefton, 18, of Country Club Hills to distraction in her junior year, when she worked at a grocery store. With a manager who kept wanting more of her time while school obligations and accelerated classes were pulling her in another direction, Sefton said the year is an unpleasant memory.
“Looking back, I really should have quit that job,” she said. “It was too much, and my manager wouldn’t cooperate.” She quit that job and started working in a mall store for her senior year. Her new manager is much more understanding, and she was able to take a lighter school load in her senior year.
On the plus side, she is bound for Eastern Illinois University in the fall and wants to be a teacher.
Her mother, Dawn, thinks working helped her daughter develop a strong work ethic, though her suffering grades in her junior year convinced her that Rachel should have quit the job during that phase.
“Part of the problem was that she was such a good worker, they kept trying to give her more hours,” Dawn said. “I went in there once to talk to the manager, and Rachel said, `Mom, come on!’ “
Dawn and other parents said that more than anything, working in less-than-desirable jobs may have motivated their children to move on to college and the prospect of better jobs.
One study, though, suggests that parents need to be careful in allowing their children to work. Professors David Post and Suet-ling Pong of Pennsylvania State University found that high school students, particularly boys, scored lower in math and science tests if they worked during the school year.
Post said that though the differences in test scores may not have been radical, the United States is coming to a point that other nations already have reached: Test scores are everything. In many cultures, those scores determine whether a child’s collar in the work world will be blue or white.
“There are lots of other countries in the world where not everyone gets a second chance,” he explained. “Responsibility and work ethic are very, very important in the United States. The benefits of working in some jobs — not every job — could well outweigh any risk of a detrimental effect on knowledge of math or science. But the point in our paper is that working is not the unmitigated salvation of youth that it popularly has been seen to be in American history.”
Poorer grades on standardized tests aren’t all that parents have to consider.
When teens work, they have more money than typical allowances permit. This excess money is the devil of teen work, and the devil’s helpers are time away from the watchful eyes of parents and association with an older peer group, according to psychologist Laurence Steinberg of Temple University.
What’s more, in his research Steinberg found little improvement in money-management skills among working teens.
“Most kids spend all or nearly all of their earnings on discretionary purchases, so there is little learned about money management,” Steinberg said. “There is some research suggesting that time management may be improved for kids who work during the school year, as long as they don’t work more than 10 hours per week.”
Interviews with teen workers tended to back up Steinberg’s idea that jeans come before college funds as teen spending priorities.
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Also Fortifying Steinberg’s position is research by Stu Fors, head of the Department of Health Promotion and Behavior at the University of Georgia in Athens. He found that teens who work during the school year are more likely to partake of risky behaviors, such as drug use. He, too, cited money as a culprit.
“The amount and hours of work were important, with those working the most at the highest risk,” he added. Nevertheless, he said that parents have a duty to teach their children about responsibility and work skills and that a job can help with this.
Associate professor James R. Stone of the University of Minnesota at St. Paul pointed out that research indicating teen jobs are detrimental must be examined carefully. “Kids who tend to work a lot are kids who are just turned off to school,” he said. “It isn’t that the working causes them to do poorly in school, it’s just that they aren’t interested in school.”
That could skew the results of some research, he said.
“The reality is very complex. There is evidence that work in high school pays off 10 or 15 years down the road in employability and earnings. A colleague of mine found that the best kind of arrangement is when kids work a moderate amount throughout high school. The theory is that these kids learn how to balance work and school and do better in a number of measures.
“My work suggests that, on the whole, work can provide benefits to youth especially in the form of learning that does not occur in the classroom,” Stone said, citing such examples as learning responsibility, working with diversity, managing time and money, negotiating one’s place vis-a-vis other workers and working as part of group to accomplish specific objectives.”
He cautioned, however, that not all workplaces are created equal: Some can be great for kids, some can be terrible. He and others who follow teen work said parents must be vigilant about their children’s workplace.
One former northwest suburban mother who now lives in Chicago explained how her family learned that lesson.
Eight years ago her then 16-year-old son started work at a restaurant only three blocks from their home. Within a few weeks her son found that the manager, a male in his 20s, preyed on boys sexually, trying to lure them with gifts and drinking parties. Fortunately, the son told his parents. That led to a sexual battery conviction, but for a mother who had been there with the car every night to pick up her son after work, it was a shock.
“The biggest thing about it as a parent was that I couldn’t protect my son,” she said. “But parents need to keep the lines of communication open and realize that that supervisor has a great deal of control and influence over your child. You had better know who that person is.”
On the flip side, Brian Causey of East Chicago, Ind., sees the good that work can do for teens, and wrote a booklet based on his experiences as a restaurant general manager for Church’s Chicken.
“It teaches them responsibility, gets them ready for the adult sector,” he said. “They know what is going to be expected of them, and I think it gives them time-management and communication skills. As an employer, I can tell you kids who work are easier to train than those who haven’t worked or the ones who didn’t have any responsibility at home.”
He also cautions that work must be the teen’s idea, not a parent’s.
Nancy Peterson of Libertyville thinks that in addition to pluses such as responsibility, one thing she really likes about daughter Meghan’s weekend job at a nearby restaurant is that she knows where the 17-year-old is.
“If she weren’t working, she’d be out somewhere,” Peterson said. “I’m finding it much easier to keep track of her. She’s more accountable for her time. I also think it’s been really good for her self-esteem. I feel very strongly about that.”
For her part, Meghan would have to agree, plus she is able to buy the clothes she wants.
The discussion she hasn’t had with her parents is about saving for college, but that discussion is coming, her mother said.
And education is what John A. Challenger sees as key to the teen jobs of today. As chief executive officer of the international outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. in Chicago, he is an expert in workplace issues.
He sees more and more jobs, especially technology related, that can challenge teens and help launch post-college careers, such as with Michael Stahl.
“These kids have real skills, and they are skills that the market needs,” Challenger said. “I can’t think of a time when that’s happened before. There’s a real comfort with technology that these kids have.”
Nevertheless, as a parent, he said he would allow his child to work only during the summer, not during the school year, because he thinks school work is enough to keep a child busy.
Though he didn’t work during the school year, Michael Moore, 24, of Barrington thinks the jobs he did during the summer, working at a hardware store and a bank and mowing lawns, were rewarding. Now a medical student at the University of Pittsburgh, he said, “I think all of them had value as far as the work ethic.”
But the job he took in the summer before his senior year was the big one. Working six weeks in a program for high school students as a physician’s assistant at Good Shepherd Hospital in Barrington was “essential. It gave me an opportunity to explore what I was interested in.”
That follows with business whiz Michael Stahl’s advice: “You should get a job you enjoy.” Then he added that if that’s not possible, “do something so bad that when you’re in college, you know what you don’t want to do the rest of your life.”
HOW TO STAY IN TOUCH WITH YOUR TEEN’S FINANCES
The not-for-profit Consolidated Credit Counseling Services Inc. of Ft. Lauderdale offers these tips on how parents can stay involved in their children’s money and thus in their increasingly independent lives.
1. Do not open an account that will let your child have access to an ATM card. Late-night partying purchases can be avoided if they have to wait for the banks to open.
2. Talk to your child’s employer so you know how many hours your child will work in an average week and what the pay rate is.
3. Draw up a budget with your child. This can accomplish three things: (1) You can find out what your child wants to spend money on. (2) It gives you an idea of how much income the child will have left over. (3) It will be a valuable learning process for your child.
4. Teaching your child to budget and the value of money will benefit them as adults and should be part of raising every child. Most high school students lack personal finance skills, and when they turn 18, many fall into credit card debt or have to rely financially on their parents well into their 20s.
5. Consolidated Credit also has a free budgeting kit on its Web site, debtfree.org, that parents can use as a model for their children.
6. Parents also might want to consider a device such as VISA’s PocketCard. Parents can control the flow of money into and out of that debit-card account, plus check account action daily by phone or computer.
Though April Lewis, director of education for Consolidated Credit, was unfamiliar with the card itself, she said any method of increasing parental control is a plus.
WHAT THE LAW SAYS ABOUT TEEN WORKERS
For most jobs, children aged 14 and 15 must have work permits, as prescribed by Illinois law. Those permits are issued by a child’s school, after the applicant has had a physical and supplied proof of age plus a letter of intent from the employer explaining the job and hours. The child also must be accompanied by a parent or guardian in submitting the application.
Exempt from these requirements are such jobs as baby-sitting.
Work restrictions are greater during the school year, of course, the idea being that a child should not sell his or her future for a few bucks now.
Here are the basic restrictions:
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– Minors may not work before 7 a.m. and must stop by 7 p.m. between Labor Day and June 1 or by 9 p.m. June 1 through Labor Day.
– Work cannot extend more than three hours on school days and eight hours on non-school days.
– They cannot work more than 24 hours during school weeks or 48 hours during non-school weeks. (The rule of thumb among those who study teen labor is that children should not work more than 20 hours a week during the school year, and many would say no more than 15 hours.)
– They cannot work more than six days in one week.
The list of jobs 14- and 15-year-olds cannot do is long, but basically the idea is to keep them away from dangerous machinery such as power tools or away from hazards such as traffic.
Children 16 and 17 do not require a permit to work, but they still come under federal labor law, which prohibits the same kind of hazardous work as state law does for younger teens. They also are not allowed to drive as part of a job or to work as a helper on a motor vehicle. Hours, however, are not limited by federal law.