Is Having a Part-Time Job During the School Year Doable? What I Learned From My Teen
Last Tuesday, I found my 16-year-old Mia slouched over the kitchen counter at 10:02 pm, her math homework smudged with fry grease, a half-empty iced coffee from the café where she works propped next to a text from her manager: Can you cover closing Saturday? She rubbed her red eyes and said, “I think I’m in over my head. Did I mess up by taking this job?”
When she first asked for the job back in August, I was ready to say no. I worked 25 hours a week bagging groceries when I was in 11th grade, and I flunked my first chemistry midterm because I never had time to study. I knew how easy it was to let shifts take over. But Mia kept bringing it up: she wanted to save for a summer road trip with her friends, pay for her own gas, stop asking me for $20 every time she went out to the movies. She promised she’d never work more than 12 hours a week, never take a closing shift on a school night. So I caved.
The first month was weirdly smooth. She stopped staying in bed until 10 minutes before the bus came, started packing her own lunch the night before, because she had to leave straight from school for her shift. She came home every day talking about Mr. Henderson, the retired teacher who gets a black coffee every morning and leaves her a $5 tip every Friday, and how the manager let her practice latte art on her break. I started thinking maybe my bad experience was just because I’d worked way too many hours.
Then midterms rolled around. Mia had two extra shifts the first week of testing—two of her coworkers got flu, so she said yes to both. One of them was a closing shift on a Tuesday, which meant she got home at 9:45 and only had an hour to study for her biology midterm. She got a C minus, the first grade she’d gotten below a B since middle school. That’s when we ended up at the kitchen counter at 10 pm, talking through whether she should quit.
I didn’t tell her I told you so, mostly because I didn’t want to be that parent. Instead, we pulled out her planner and went through every hour of her average week, line by line. That’s when I noticed something I’d missed: before she got the job, she spent almost two hours every weekday scrolling TikTok and hanging out on Instagram after school before she started homework. Now she gets home at 6, eats dinner, and starts homework by 7. That adds up to an extra hour and 15 minutes of productive time a day, even with her shifts. The problem wasn’t the job itself—it was the extra unplanned shifts she couldn’t say no to, and the fact that she’d tried to keep every after-school activity she already had.
That’s where we started adjusting, and that’s when it got doable again. First, we helped her come up with a line to use when her manager asks for a shift that doesn’t work. She’s a people pleaser, so she hates saying no, so we practiced: “That shift doesn’t fit my school schedule, so I can’t take it.” That’s it, no extra excuses needed. Her manager didn’t care, actually—she’s used to working with high school kids. Second, we set a hard rule: one extra shift a month, maximum. No exceptions, even if it’s for double pay. Third, she decided to drop the extra after-school art class she’d signed up for back in September. She’d only joined because her best friend did, and she’d been saying for weeks that it was boring and she never did the homework anyway. That freed up three hours a week, no big loss for her. Fourth, we do a 10-minute calendar check every Sunday night, before the week starts. We map out shifts, tests, and any big homework deadlines, so if there’s a conflict, she can swap shifts with a coworker ahead of time instead of scrambling at the last minute.
I called her guidance counselor the next week to check in, just to make sure we weren’t making a mistake. She told me that what we’re doing lines up with what she sees every year: teens who work 10 to 15 hours a week during the school year usually have better time management than teens who don’t work at all. It’s only when they go over 15 hours a week that grades drop and stress gets unmanageable. That makes sense, after what I’ve seen.
It’s not perfect. Last week, she forgot to walk the dog after school because she left early for a shift, and I had to do it. She got a sleepy warning from her first period teacher last month because she’d worked until 8:30 the night before and woke up 10 minutes late. Sometimes I still lie awake wondering if we’re letting her sacrifice good grades for a little spending money. But last week, she showed me her savings account: $920, already, three months into the job. She brought home a free bag of coffee beans for me that the manager gave her, and she talked about how the regulars ask for her by name when they come in.
I don’t have a neat answer. It works for Mia right now, but it might not work in three months when finals hit, or if she gets a busier schedule next semester. The answer isn’t yes or no, it depends. It depends on how many hours they work, how comfortable they are turning down shifts that don’t fit, and what they’re willing to give up to make it work. For us, right now, it’s doable—most days, anyway.
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