The weather is warm, the pool is calling, and lifeguards are reporting for duty all across America, along with camp counselors, ice cream scoopers, and other traditional teen workers. But how many of these jobs are still held by teens?

The teen summer job is an American tradition that has been in decline since the turn of the century. From the 1950s through the 1990s, between 50% and 60% of Americans aged 16 to 19 had summer jobs. That started to decline in 2000, and during the Great Recession, it plummeted to less than 30%. It has barely rebounded since then, hitting 36% in 2019 before dropping back to 31% during the pandemic. This year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics put the share of 16- to 19-year-olds working or looking for work at 35%.

Can the teen summer job be saved? Should it be saved? That depends on why it is disappearing.

One factor is immigration. Many of the jobs formerly held by teens are now held by immigrants, especially in food service, by far the most popular industry for teen workers. High-immigration states have the lowest teen summer employment rates, including California (24%), New York (29%), Nevada (24%), and Texas (29%). The states with the highest teen summer employment rates, at 75% and 67%, are Maine and Vermont.

Immigrant workers not only displace teens, they also make it harder for teens to break into industries that were once more welcoming. Construction and landscaping used to be great jobs for teenagers, but expecting a teenager to be the only English-speaking guy on a site puts them in an uncomfortable position—and a potentially dangerous one if they can’t communicate with their coworkers.

Another factor is the rise of national chains. A local shop owner could decide to employ an untried teenager for any reason he liked, either because he knew the kid through social networks or because he just had a good feeling about him.
https://commonplace.org/2025/07/16/are-teen-summer-jobs-obsolete/

When locally owned stores are replaced by chains, managers have less leeway. One teenager I know had a job lined up at a gaming store through a friendly manager, only to have headquarters cancel the offer after learning he was under 18.

Some corporations have a policy against employing teenagers. Uber drivers have to be at least 21, which eliminates what could have been an ideal part-time gig for students on summer break. Other workplaces have strict rules for young workers based on concerns about liability. A mom I know tried to get her teenager a job volunteering at an animal shelter, only to discover that most local shelters did not allow volunteers under 18 and the one that did had absurd rules, including that they couldn’t touch the animals and that a parent had to be on site at all times during their shift.

Those are the “push” factors. Then there are the “pull” factors: those activities besides working that teenagers now spend their summers doing instead.

One curious fact about teen summer employment rates is that Asian teens are least likely to have a job. Only 20% of Asians aged 16 to 19 have one, compared to 40% of whites and approximately 30% of blacks and Hispanics. For adults it is the opposite, with Asians having the highest labor force participation rate.

Why are Asians half as likely to have summer jobs as white teenagers? In part, because they are busy studying. Tiger Moms think working as a lifeguard will not help anyone get into college, but test prep or math camp will.

The college admissions arms race puts pressure on parents who might otherwise prefer to let their teens spend their summer lifeguarding.

Moms and dads worried about the intense competition decide to make their teens spend their summers on something that will boost their test scores or burnish their resumes. It is a vicious circle. As more kids get swept up in devoting all their free time to extracurricular activities, the holdouts start to worry more about falling behind. Peer pressure is a factor, too, with no one wanting to be the only one of their friends with an unglamorous job.

Surprisingly, teens from high-income households are more likely to have summer jobs than those from low-income households. The Department of Labor found that in 2023 households earning $100,000 to $150,000 per year had teen summer employment rates of 46%. For households earning less than $60,000, it was below 30%.

This might seem counterintuitive. You’d think rich teens would have the luxury to spend their summers traveling or pursuing hobbies, while working-class teens have to work to save for college and other expenses. It turns out that teen jobs are actually the luxury.

Why do families that can afford to let their children spend their summers doing anything they want choose to put them to work? Because summer jobs are good for teens, good for their parents, and good for society at large.

Working for pay as a teenager teaches many lessons: self-reliance and discipline; respect for manual labor and other forms of work that elites often denigrate; exposure to people beyond your socioeconomic bubble.

“My first real job was as a bag boy for a Winn-Dixie grocery store,” says writer Aaron Renn. “I enjoyed the work, the money that came with it, and the camaraderie with the other employees.” Even as a bag boy, Renn glimpsed the inside workings of the grocery business with its razor-thin margins.

“I still remember a training video we watched that solemnly informed us that if we used the wrong size bag for an order, one that was too big, we could actually cost the company the entire profit on that order.”

Advocate Chris Rufo says his most memorable summer job as a teen was washing windows. “I recruited a friend and we went around the wealthiest neighborhoods in town and pitched our services door-to-door,” he says. The pay was better than his friends earned flipping burgers. “We were the kings of the summer—and learned how to sell, which is a universal skill.”

Author Michael Brendan Dougherty got his first job at Burger King at age 14. “Lots of my friends made temporary appearances in that drive thru window or the one at McDonald’s,” he says. None of them worked there for very long, but the steady stream of applicants meant that the managers of those fast-food joints stayed open to giving high-school kids a chance. Sometimes the lesson learned isn’t a new skill, it’s something you learn about yourself. Camp counselors discover that they like the outdoors or enjoy working with children. These discoveries can guide people as they choose their future careers, pointing them toward industries or positions they might never have considered.

It can also put them onto a lifelong hobby. My own summer job was at a bakery owned by a Frenchman who had been through his country’s ancient guild system, and watching the way he made bread gave me a love of baking that I still retain today. I doubt I would have picked it up otherwise.

The most common response I got, from the dozens of people I talked to for this article, to what they got out of their teen summer job was appreciation—for how hard these jobs are and for how little respect they get.

Here at American Compass, the staff’s teen summer jobs include McDonald’s worker, hair salon assistant, poolside waiter at a country club, funeral home attendant, Turkish restaurant waitress, and Italian ice scooper.

Everyone who worked in food service says they learned to be gracious to waitstaff. “It’s a lot of work for not a lot of money,” says one. “I quickly learned how little respect these kinds of jobs garner.”

I worked at a donut store for one summer. I learned respect for anyone whose workday starts at 5:30 in the morning. I also learned not to romanticize the working class. One of my coworkers would always steal the cash out of my bag from the breakroom, until eventually I had to stop keeping any bills in my wallet. I remember how it always brightened everyone’s day when a celebrity came in, like the local weatherman or Olympic runner Marion Jones, who lived nearby and always ordered a bear claw.

That respect—learned and otherwise—for manual labor is a distinctively American cultural trait. America is supposed to be the land of millionaires who carry their own bags, unlike other countries where having a flunky to carry your briefcase is a sign of status. American men used to take pride in mowing their own lawns and doing their own household repairs, even when their day jobs were well-remunerated white collar work that paid enough that they could afford to delegate those chores.

In many other cultures, wealthy families would never dream of having their sons and daughters work menial jobs because those positions are regarded as beneath their dignity. As America’s class divide deepens, we are in danger of falling into the same mentality. Many middle-class men now pay someone else to mow their lawns and fix their toilets, just as their wives pay someone else to cook their meals and clean their homes. Immigration and the gig economy have brought servants back to the middle class in America. The fact that many of these cleaners and landscapers look different than the families that employ them reinforces the sense that manual labor is something for other people.

The political implications are dire: If people in “crappy jobs” are a totally different class, then the elite will stop caring about their problems or even noticing them in the first place. Having teenagers work as landscapers or baristas for a summer won’t solve all of America’s polarization problems, but at least it will give them some memories of what those jobs and those workers are like.

So can the teen summer job be saved? Step one is to make them available to teenagers again. That means continuing this administration’s tough immigration enforcement and getting rid of any unnecessarily risk-averse policies against employing teenagers.

If the jobs are open, teens will flock to them. In Colorado, college kids are applying in droves for seasonal jobs at ski resorts, which were formerly held by foreign workers under a visa program that the Trump administration canceled, according to a recent story in the Colorado Sun. “Our applications from college kids are up pretty significantly over prior years,” says an Aspen resort manager who previously hired about 400 foreign workers per year. “We are targeting college-age applicants, but they seem to be targeting us as well.”

Doing so will help shape a happier generation of young people. A Harvard study that ran from the 1930s to the 1970s tracked the lives of more than a thousand teenage boys in the Boston area. It found that “industriousness in childhood—as indicated by such things as whether boys had part-time jobs, took on chores, or joined school clubs or sports teams—predicted adult mental health better than any other factor.”

Having a job as a teenager makes people happier. It puts money in their pockets, gives them funny stories they’ll always remember, and teaches them valuable lessons about the real world that they will never learn in the cloistered environment of school. Some people shrug off the decline of teen jobs as a matter of indifference. Who cares if teenagers spend their summers studying for the SAT or if immigrants work those jobs instead? That is short-sighted. The teen summer job is an American tradition worth preserving.

END

tl;dr
>Immigrant workers not only displace teens, they also make it harder for teens to break into industries that were once more welcoming. Construction and landscaping used to be great jobs for teenagers, but expecting a teenager to be the only English-speaking guy on a site puts them in an uncomfortable position—and a potentially dangerous one if they can’t communicate with their coworkers.

TLDR? I’m not fucking reading 7 essays

>>510562146
see
>>510562140

White nostalgia, not even once

>>510561866 (OP)
>>510561866 (OP)
If you can't fuck the teens anymore what's the point?

>>510562714
Anon those are not teens those are kids

>>510561866 (OP)
Summer jobs have changed.
Now kids start a tiktok channel or make a million dollars off a roblox game.

>>510561938
Being forced to pickup a manual labor job did nothing but confirm my reasons for not respecting it. It's a waste of time, especially if you were already physically active and fit as a kid.

cool read

>>510561866 (OP)
Cultural change combined with companies simply refusing to hire teens.

Why hire a teen who might be a bit dim and know nothing about the corporate world when you can hire Ranjeet who will maybe use his feet to make sandwiches but will work overtime for free and can be fired without notice for any reason.

Ranjeet will also sublet his job to 5 other jeets and split the pay between then, a ploy I call “subjeeting”

>>510563406

>>510562146

--

>>510563671

>>510563711

>>510563763

>>510563817

>>510562511
It's the motivator needed to reclaim what was taken.

>>510561866 (OP)
>>510562855
>>510563406
Money is a big factor.
My sister works for one of those US companies that most people never heard of but does a lot of government contract work.
Previously her kids took summer jobs at the local fast food chain where the owners knew them and had enough leeway to hire them.
The money sucked but it was their money so they were happy with it.
Then my sister got them the bottom of the barrel, lowest of the low job at the company she works at.
Again, just a summer job, hours were horrible, and the work was mind numbing, but because of the company they were getting paid $26/hour.
So now the kids are in college and during the summer when looking for jobs they refuse to take anything that pays under $21/hour because as my niece put it, she could invest what little she has in the market and spend all day hanging out with friends or gaming, and be in a better place than she would be for doing bullshit work for 15/hour.
When I asked her about that, she explained that the health costs from stress and not sleeping as well, the gas costs from driving to work, and the general time cost of doing shit she doesn't like makes it so those lower paying jobs end up costing her in the end.
I don't entirely agree, but I respect her reasoning at least, and I suspect she's far from the only one who thinks that way.
Meanwhile her brother found out how much working as a computer repair guy at the local shop near him pays versus how much they charge so now he just does computer repairs for people at like 5/hour more than he'd make if he did it for the shop but still cheaper than it would be for people to go there.