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

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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What this means is millions of teens are at home — or hanging out somewhere — likely playing video games and scrolling through social media all day and night. The percentage goes up in the poorer neighborhoods — places where they are much more likely to be in fatherless homes.

Free play is a critical part of social and personal development, but a summer of nothing but screen time can lead teens into who knows what online and in their neighborhoods.

Also, when parents later complain that their kids were indoctrinated by teachers and professors with political ideologies or values the parents do not share, I ask what challenges they gave their kids, as positively learning or overcoming real things builds a foundation of conservative values that later help them critically evaluate impractical ideologies (such as socialism).

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Summer jobs, of course, can do this. A teen with a job has to show up on time, be in the proper attire, speak clearly, treat customers respectably (even when the customers are rude), and much more. But what these jobs can teach is limited.

A good parent adds challenges — this is where it gets interesting, individualistic and difficult.

Many parents have a hard time with this; for example, when I coached my son’s soccer team, I literally had parents ask me if I could tell their son, "No," as they said they could not do that — and these were dads.

I have also had many parents ask me how I regulate my son’s screen time. I always flip the script by answering that screen time is a useful tool, as it is so easy to take away if benchmarks are not being met. When they hear this, parents typically frown and tell me they can’t do that.

When I see this reaction, I tell them it doesn’t need to be negative. (Indeed, when youth see their parents are firm, the friction they give goes away a little more each time.)

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Parents do need to have some idea what their son or daughter is interested in. If it is a sport, break it down into three parts as a summer challenge: physical goals (every sport has drills that teach skills — help them come up with and master three skills before sports begin again in the fall); mental challenges (require them to draw, animate or write about these skills); and set related goals that inspire, such as reading a book on the topic.

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It is easy for an involved parent to ask about the progress on these three parts and then to help.

And it needn’t just be a sport. My son is into karate, animation and science. Those are diverse topics, but they can come together. He is now mastering his next kata and volunteering in the dojo by helping to teach younger kids (he is about to turn 14). He is using Adobe products to create a cartoon of a karate master doing his kata. He is reading Andy Weir’s "The Martian," as it is about a man who has to use science to survive. (Picking a book for/with a teen is complicated and personal; the keys are: a teen needs to be into the main character and the adventure, the books needs to challenge them but not overwhelm them, and it needs to teach good lessons — I wrote "Cool Heroes for Boy" to do precisely do all of that.)

All the parts of his summer challenge are checkable, positive and are within areas my son is interested in. If he misses a benchmark, he loses screen time — benchmarks, of course, do need to be adjusted at times. But I always find that, as long as I remain open, honest and compassionate, my son happily stays within the steps of the adventure.

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