Opinion

I worry less about screens than about the challenges today’s teens never face

More than 11 million high schoolers lack summer jobs and unstructured screen time could fill the void

By Frank Miniter Fox News

Published July 19, 2026 7:00am EDT

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A summer job was once a rite of passage for teens hired to staff local restaurants, stores, and pools. But today the percentage of 16-19-year-olds now working summer jobs is at or near the lowest levels since the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking this data just after World War II.

Today, about one in three 16-19-year-olds have a summer job. As there are about 17 million high-school-aged students in the U.S., this means that more than 11 million currently don’t have a summer job.

About half of these teens participate in some type of summer camp, according to Gallup, but many of these camps are day camps that only last one week (baseball camps, soccer camps, band camps, and so on). Also, the "gap in participation rates between upper- and lower-income families is nearly 30 percentage points, 67% versus 38%," determined Gallup.

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