Working while attending high school has negative effects on students' school performance, on their spending habits, and on their social life and behavior. Students who devote too much time to work often do not have enough time to do homework, are too tired to pay attention in class, and may miss more school, resulting in low grades and even dropping out. The spending patterns of students who work show that they are not interested in saving for important goals or helping their families' economic situations. Instead they tend to increase their consumerism and spend most or all of their earnings on luxuries such as entertainment, cars, and clothing. Finally, students' jobs tend to limit their participation in normal socializing--in spending time with their families and friends--and expose them to pressures to behave in a more 'adult' way. This can include smoking, using drugs, and drinking alcohol, which become more available as they can afford them and they are in contact with older workers. It may seem that jobs for high-school students will offer them opportunities to learn about working, to prepare them for adulthood, to earn badly needed money, or to develop a sense of responsibility. But jobs are more likely to work against the preparation offered by school, to encourage foolish spending, and to cause students to be less responsible as they place the job first or engage in harmful behaviors.
Although a student job has many negative effects the harm caused by work will depend on the amount of time it consumes, "its quality, its meaning, and the context in which it occurs" (Mortimer & Finch 4). Baby-sitting for a few hours on a Friday night or working in a store on a Saturday afternoon may have good effects as teen-agers learn "how to relate to supervisors, cooperate with coworkers [or] deal with customers" (Mortimer & Finch 5). But today over four million students work during the school year and "about one half of senio...