Should Kids Work?

Should Kids Work?

Should kids work? Parents have long suspected that teenagers who work long hours outside the home do poorly in school. Studies confirm that suspicion, as many of them found that teens who worked 20 hours or more a week after a school got grades half a letter lower than youngsters who worked fewer than 10 hours a week.

Kids who spent more than 20 hours a work compensated for shorter hours spent on school work by cheating, copying assignments, and cutting classes more frequently. More alarming are the results of one study : Teens who worked more than 20 hours a week used drugs and alcohol 33 percent more often than those who didn’t work at all.

Make the allowance large enough so that some of it can be saved. If a kindergartner gets $1 a week and every penny is accounted for, he or she will lose the opportunity to develop the planning-ahead and saving skills of money management.

As children get older, increase their allowance and what it should cover. This gives them more experience managing larger sums of money and more opportunity to make choices about how to spend it.

New York in construction. Should children work here? Photo by Elena.

How Much Is Too Much?

What’s too little? What’s too much? The amount of allowance to give depends mostly on whether you live in an expensive metropolis or a less costly suburb. It also reflects which costs the child is expected to absorb, such as bus or lunch money, for example.

Many kids are making money the old-fashioned way : working for it.

What Do Teens Spend Their Money On?

Very little of a teenager’s money gets tucked away for the future, accroding to all surveys. Les tnah 10 percent of the students are saving most of all of their monthly income for tuition, and a mere 3 percent are using the money to help out their families.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of the youngsters spend all or most of their monthly earnings on themselves for immediate purchases.