AP32347

Science Summary

According to the article "Summer Jobs Are Good for Kids, Says Study", teenagers who work at summer or evening jobs have a competitive advantage later in life (University of British Columbia). The article suggests that even burger-flipping jobs have value. Researchers from the University of British Columbia used data from the Statistics Canada Youth in Transition Survey. This survey included 246,661 fifteen-year-old Canadian teenagers and their work history beginning at age 15 and ending at age 25 in 2009. They observed that the teenagers that started working at age fifteen were better suited for future careers because early exposure to work helped them "hone their preferences." The article also suggests that parents are more likely to put their teenagers in summer camps rather than summer jobs, but research shows that working can offer educational and developmental opportunities that prepare a teenager for the "real world." This information is correlational. Perhaps, the type of 15 year old motivated to get a job at a young age is also the type of person to excel in their career later in life. Denise Boyd and Helen Bee offer a different stance on teenage employment in their book. "Research across the last two decades suggests that the more hours teenagers work during high school, the more likely they are to become sexually active, use drugs (alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, cocaine), display aggression toward peers, argue with parents, get inadequate sleep, and be dissatisfied with life" (Boyd and Bee, 308). I believe that this mixture of data should help parents realize that not all teenagers are the same. The way one teenager might react to getting a job could be completely different than how another teenager might react.

References:

University of British Columbia. "Summer Jobs Are Good for Kids, Says Study." //ScienceDaily//. ScienceDaily, 7 Jul. 2014. Web. 23 Jul. 2014.

Boyd, Denise, and Helen Bee. //Lifespan Development//. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2012. Print.

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