20-Hour Work Week Plenty For Teens Law Needed Energy Spent On Job Means Less For School.

For today’s teens, cash shimmers like an illusion.

A paycheck from a fast food restaurant or a grocery store opens a world of adult independence. When combined with appropriate limits, after-school jobs provide valuable new work skills and confidence. But for kids who work more than 20 hours per week during the school year, the results can be dangerous.

According to a significant new report from a committee of the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine, kids who work excessive hours during the school year are more likely to use drugs, get in trouble with police and drop out of school.

These kids yawn and sleep in class. They trade the energy that learning requires for cash. But their money is less likely to be building a college fund than a CD collection. Pressed into becoming miniature adults, these kids respond by taking on adult-sized debts. Their salaries become necessities as they write out monthly checks for car and insurance payments. Perhaps influenced by the tastes of their older co-workers, they also spend on drugs, alcohol and cigarettes.

The panel of scientists behind this report wisely recommends that Congress allow the Department of Labor to limit the hours 16-and 17-year-olds can work, and protect them from safety hazards such as toxic chemicals and dangerous equipment. We agree.

Federal child labor laws, written in an era when kids often dropped out of school to work on farms, currently restrict work hours only for children under age 16. In the meantime, progressive states such as Washington have made education a priority and written their own teen work rules.

The committee’s sound recommendations are modeled, in part, after Washington state laws which are already successful. Here, 16-and 17-year-olds may not work more than 20 hours per week during the school year, with several important exceptions. Economic necessity is one.

In the best of all worlds, these decisions could simply be left in the capable hands of parents and employers who care. But this is not that world. This is a world where, in the crush of competitive pressures, a 16-year-old’s simple needs for sleep and family connection can be forgotten.

In this world, cash shimmers, an illusion which betrays. For this economy rewards best the students who stay in school longest.