3 Life Lessons Only A Real Summer Job Can Teach Teens

 

If you're wondering why a wealth advisor is writing about summer jobs for teens, it turns out that a big part of my role with my clients is helping them ensure that their wealth does not interfere with their children's ability to launch successful and independent lives.

In that vein, in my travels in the wealth advising industry, it's clear that the traditional summer job is becoming a thing of the past, replaced by a litany of enrichment and volunteer experiences carefully curated and tailored to provide maximum leadership experiences and resume impact.  That's unfortunate.  I've spent the last year and a half interviewing successful inheritors – kids raised around wealth who grew up to be content, grateful, motivated, and engaged – and a startling number of them remember their high school summer jobs as formative to their identity and work ethic.  It turns out that early work in the form of a real summer job – one where the child is held accountable on the basis of how they perform rather than who they are or where they come from – teaches affluent children key financial and life lessons they are hard pressed to learn elsewhere:

1. How to earn their own money and the value of a dollar – It is through a summer job that kids first experience earning their own money and the satisfaction of buying something with money they earned.  This is a thrilling, immensely satisfying and empowering experience for all kids, but especially for affluent children for whom money accumulation has always been their parents' domain.  The inheritors I spoke with all spoke to this phenomenon – no matter how many luxuries had been bought for them by their parents, the first thing they really appreciated was the thing they bought with money they themselves had earned.  And then there's the issue of the value of a dollar:  There's nothing like making $7/hour to show you how much that $500 skirt you bought on your parents' credit card really cost.  That is a perspective you can't buy your child.  They have to learn it for themselves.