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Social Forces 84.1 (2005) 610-612



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Working and Growing Up In America. By Jeylan T. Mortimer. Harvard University Press, 2004. 283 pages. $45 (cloth), $19.95 (paper).

Working and Growing Up in America is a fairly straightforward text. Mortimer's primary objective is to put to rest a long-running debate about whether or not paid work is detrimental to or enhances the lives of adolescents while in high school and beyond. Employing the Youth Development Study (YDS), a St. Paul, Minnesota-based, 10-year longitudinal project examining the high school work experiences of adolescents who were 14- to 15-year-old 9th graders in wave one, Mortimer investigates a variety of aspects of youthwork, such as the amount of time that youth allocate to paid work, both formal and informal; the quality of the work that they do; the extent to which paid work affects their engagement in other productive activities; their motivations behind working; the short- and long-run consequences of paid work on adolescents' mental health and problem behaviors; and how work affects their transitions to adulthood. [End Page 610]

So, should adolescents work? This is the title of Working's first chapter and the question that motivates this research. At the very least, the answer seems to be "why not?" Objectively and subjectively, working teens appear no worse for the experience than their non-working counterparts. At most the answer is a resounding yes. Mortimer reports little-to-no support for the perspective that the costs of youthwork far outweigh its benefits, specifically that adolescent work takes too much time and energy away from other pursuits deemed important to the development of healthy teenagers, that youthwork encourages teenagers to act like adults too quickly, and that the work itself is a harmful experience, exposing teenagers to potentially hazardous conditions and creating unnecessary stresses. Instead she shows that adolescent work is, by and large, a very positive experience. The majority of working teens feel well supported by their supervisors, only a minority report serious stresses associated with the workplace, and they are generally satisfied with extrinsic rewards of work. Furthermore, Mortimer finds that youthwork does not take away from other productive or leisurely pursuits; nor does it generally lead to poor mental and behavioral outcomes. Instead, adolescent workers actually spend more time than nonworkers on other activities, specifically homework and extracurriculars, and they suffer no greater negative psycho-social consequences in terms of mental health, educational achievement, vocational development, and/or interpersonal relationships.

Working and Growing Up in America fills an important empirical gap and, as such, is required reading for anyone interested in adolescent employment. However, Working is not without its shortcomings. Indeed, Mortimer misses a fine opportunity to go beyond current debates about whether or not or to what extent youthwork is problematic – a rather stale and tensionless debate if there ever was one – by more critically questioning the primary role that youthwork plays in the lives of adolescents so engaged. One leaves Working with the notion that youthwork's primary purpose is to earn adolescents a little extra cash, provide teens a little autonomy from parents and teachers, teach them proper work values, and build their self-efficacy. As important as these are for youth development, adolescent paid work is far more. Specifically, it represents a very important stage in the process of social reproduction, a point that is intimated occasionally in Working, but that is never really handled directly. One of the most interesting findings to emerge from this study – although not altogether surprising given works like Jay MacLeod's Ain't No Makin' It – is that teenagers determine their level of work commitment based in part on current educational achievement and their future aspirations and expectations regarding work and school. However, whether or not teenagers work during adolescence, how moderately and consistently they work, and in what types of jobs – each of these aspects critical for the development of social, cultural, human and financial capital as well as an agentic sense of themselves – is highly contingent on...

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