We see so many movies and TV series from America, it feels like I know the place. And it is similar in many ways. The labour laws @Kimstu linked to are much like the UK ones, except they allow for longer hours. But as far as I know school kids working a significant amount is pretty rare in the UK, unless it is in a family business.
Honestly, I was wondering if you were going to say that there are laws but they aren’t adhered to, or something like that.
That’s cool.
Depends on what being employed means.
I started mowing lawns, raking leaves, shoveling driveways and doing other work like that around 10.
My family wasn’t poor, but if I wanted any spending money for myself, that’s where it came from.
Got my first “real job” (meaning a w-2 and a paycheck) a couple days after I turned 15.
Yeah, I started babysitting when I was eleven and a half, and I’ve never NOT had a job since…until I retired 8 years ago.
This might be the best joke I’ve read all week! Thanks DemonTree!
You’re probably aware of this at least in theory, but American entertainment media generally provides a distorted picture of American reality.
Characters in American media tend to be much whiter, much wealthier, much less Hispanic, much more heterosexual, and much less affected by systemic societal problems than Americans in real life. That’s not to say that no other types of Americans ever get represented in the media, but our movies and TV overall tend towards an aspirational portrait of the white middle class.
Hey, I’ve seen a few episodes of Absolutely Fabulous, that means I know all about the economic, educational, and social issues in the UK.
ETA: Oddly, most of what I know of the geography of the UK comes from Doctor Who.
Nitpick: most depends on the area and is true in some places but not others; overall it’s about 20%.
Eta: but that undercuts it because it wouldn’t count me (working breaks at my dad’s business) or my wife (reffing sports games on weekends and probably making more money than the kids who worked at the grocery store for example).
Yeah, but I think it’s fair to say that most students have a job during at least part of their high school careers.
I agree with you that the data indicate that among high school students overall at any particular moment in time, only about one-fifth to one-quarter of them are employed. But I think that by the time students finish high school, more than half of them will have been employed during some part of their schooling.
That’s fair. And as I mentioned the stats undercount certain sorts of “employment”.
Sure, it’s probably still a subliminal influence or something, though.
On Netflix I think it may be the other way around right now. 
But something I have heard is that US media is unrealistic because it shows schools etc as being racially integrated, when the reality is that they are not. Dunno how true that is, obviously.
20% is a long way from ‘most’. In the UK I think there just aren’t that many jobs for teenagers. I babysat, but I wouldn’t count that as a job, and my sister had a paper round, but I don’t think it interfered with her education.
I like how you’re focusing on the nitpick and not on the discussion we had about why it doesn’t tell the whole story moments later.
I think the actual important question is how much they are working. Earlier you said you had plenty of time to read, now you say you did work during High School. That’s kind of how I thought of teenagers working - as a minor thing that wouldn’t be likely to affect their education. But that doesn’t sound like what @puzzlegal is talking about. I think that’s where the confusion is coming from.
In my upper-middle-class school, my classmates flipped burgers, and sold clothing, and worked (summers) for landscapers, and bagged groceries. Some also worked in research labs, babysat, or went into business for themselves selling pet rocks.
Few teenagers work so much that they can’t complete their class work. Many work for hours that unemployed kids might have spent reading recreationally.
I read hundreds of books while i was in high school. That’s how i spent a huge fraction of my time. That’s why i developed an enormous vocabulary. Most kids don’t. Many kids can’t.
What about your classmates who flipped burgers, sold clothing etc? Were they able to spend their time reading, or not?
And do you think your time spent reading was valuable, apart from it’s effect on your vocabulary?
Are you incapable of understanding the idea that the fact that I had time to read is due to the fact that I was lucky enough to have parents who were pretty well off?
I had a close friend in high school. When we were freshmen, he also loved to read. Then his parents went through a messy divorce and he has to get a job at a grocery store, then pick up more and more hours. Senior year, he was living on his own.
Going into high school, he read more than I did. By the time we graduated, he no longer had time to read, didn’t focus on his schoolwork very much, and went to a community college instead of a 4 year university (something conservatives love to recommend as a solution to study debt) but wasn’t able to balance schoolwork and feeding himself. A year and a half later he’d dropped out, and he still works at the same grocery store today.
Were they able to read at all? Of course. Were they able to spend as much time reading as i did? Of course not.
I’m not sure why you want to make everything binary.
Was my reading useful? Some of it was and some wasn’t. 
You were claiming kids do less well on the SAT because they don’t have time to read. But your classmates chose to get jobs, for extra money. That’s pretty different to what I though you meant, that lots of kids have to work, for significant hours that actually interfere with their schooling. I really can’t get a handle on which you are referring to, or how common each scenario is.
ETA: Or whether you think it’s a problem that kids work, or a problem with the test that not working can give you advantage (but only if you spend that time reading, which most kids won’t), or what point you are making exactly.
What? There isn’t a TV show or movie that shows how common it is?