CELPIP Listening Part 6 Practice Test: Part-Time Jobs for Younger Teens

NARRATOR: Ask Canadians about their first job, and many will describe a paper route, a babysitting gig or a summer spent scooping ice cream. Increasingly, though, younger teenagers are working through the school year as well, stocking shelves or pouring coffee on weeknights. Provincial rules on the minimum working age vary considerably, and in several provinces a fourteen-year-old may legally work an evening shift on a school day. Whether that is wise has become a lively question for parents and educators alike.

NARRATOR: Marcus Bell, who runs a youth employment centre in Halifax, is an energetic proponent. In his experience, a few hours of paid work teaches responsibility in ways no classroom can: arriving on time, calming an irritated customer, budgeting a first paycheque. Bell describes seventeen-year-olds who come to his centre with no work history whatsoever and struggle to land even an interview. Starting earlier, he contends, gives young people a valuable head start, and many local employers, he adds, now quietly favour applicants who have held some kind of job before. Ten hours a week, in his view, is plenty for a student in grade nine or ten, and anything beyond that defeats the purpose.

NARRATOR: Pediatrician Helen Okafor regards the trend with considerably more caution, and her concerns are difficult to dismiss. Teenagers already sleep far less than they need, she notes, and a shift that ends at nine or ten pushes homework deeper into the night. Okafor regularly sees fifteen-year-olds who are exhausted, anxious and slipping behind at school, and a job is frequently part of the picture. Once marks begin to slide in grade nine or ten, she warns, they are remarkably difficult to recover. She also wonders how faithfully every employer honours the hours a student agreed to. A manager short of staff, she observes, may find it hard not to ask the dependable kid to cover just one more shift. Summer jobs and the occasional Saturday, which leave school nights untouched, strike her as perfectly sensible.

NARRATOR: Bell's case for early responsibility is a reasonable one, and the two positions are closer than they first appear: his ten-hour ceiling and her protected school nights could easily share a rulebook. The trouble, perhaps, is that limits on paper are far easier to set than to enforce, particularly when the student, the parents and the manager each have their own reasons to look the other way. Until someone solves that, the debate seems likely to continue.