After-School Job

When a teenager rings up your purchases or serves your food, is she
trading good grades for pocket change? The answer is yes, but not
necessarily because that cash register is sucking time from academics. A
national survey of more than 330,000 teenagers suggests that we shouldn't
be concerned about how much adolescents work but about how much they want
to work.

"Preferring long work hours indicates prior lack of success with
schooling," says Jerald Bachman, Ph.D., of the Institute for Social
Research at the University of Michigan. Bachman and colleagues found that
the inclination to work long hours is more strongly correlated with low
grades and lack of college planning than are actual work hours. The
results will be published in the
International Journal of Behavioral
Development.

John Warren, Ph.D., an assistant professor of sociology at the
University of Minnesota, also believes the link between employment and
poor academic performance has more to do with a teenager's orientation
toward work than with actual hours on the job. Warren surveyed 118 10th-
through 12th-graders; students who felt their job was integral to their
identity were 50 percent more likely to work long hours after school. The
results, published in
Youth & Society, lead Warren to conclude that we
should "conceive of employment as a symptom, rather than a cause" of
academic slacking off.