A lot of this reflects what parents think is valuable.
For some, the only things worth doing are those that are directly linked to their kids’ degree subject or career choice. Therefore some parents can’t see any value in 6 hrs per week in a clothes shop, when their kid wants a law career.
People forget the skills and value gained through being out in the world, interacting with adults of all ages, and being an employee rather than a protected child. They forget the benefits gained from having to communicate with a slightly awkward boss and to having to navigate your way through communication about hours and not taking extra shifts and managing to fit school trips in with work. All of these are skills useful to any adult in any career and to anyone looking to be able to have confidence in the world and to navigate their way through independent life as a student and then worker. These are more useful skills than the CEO sending a car to collect someone from the airport for their elite work experience.
The attitude is taken that some of these jobs are beneath their families and their kids....that their kids don’t work in supermarkets and cafes. They won’t be cleaning tables in their careers or tidying up after others when earning big money later, so those things can’t possibly be relevant now. But people miss those wider benefits of being in the world and not in a bubble. Teens benefit from doing these things ...they aren’t dirtied by them. Speak to numerous doctors, lawyers, people with big careers and huge success about the jobs they did as teens and students and they will tell you of a wide range and the benefits into later life of seeing how others live and of skills of resilience, organisation and determination learned.....not things just for ‘people not like us’
Some people have lazy kids who don’t study much. For most of those, having an extra 6-8 hrs a week by not doing paid work really doesn’t result in lots more study. People with lazy kids deluded themselves if they think it does.
A few kids have such time consuming extra curriculars that doing a job wouldn’t work. That’s fair enough. The no. with that extent of extra curricular commitment is small in reality though.
I think that when it’s parents stopping kids or discouraging kids from a paid job, the reality usually is that they simply don’t want their kids to work or carry out the typical jobs available. Studying is usually spouted as the reason, but as has been said that’s a nonsense mostly, because there are plenty of hours to study, socialise, work and go extra curricular, if one doesn’t spend half the week lying on the sofa looking at a phone. Parents often don’t want their kids to work as they have the idea that if they don’t provide all the money they need, somehow they look less successful or not fully providing themselves AND quite often it can stem from this sense that the jobs are essentially beneath their kids and their family and have no value. It’s a shame because the kids really do miss out on a key experience that could be seen as a vital part of growing up. And sometimes the kids who parents ‘protect’ from the real world are actually those who are pretty lazy or very sheltered and actually those most likely to gain a lot from a few hours doing a basic role in the real world.
Again, we are talking a few hours-probably 1 shift, not talking about working vast numbers of hours or it taking over life. But those who don’t want to do the jobs often present it as something that will be 20+ hours, but that’s often because of those underlying reasons for not wanting their kids to work which are hard to articulate, even to themselves, whilst ‘impact on study’ feels like a virtuous reason.