<p>My son worked throughout the school year by his own choice – starting halfway through his freshman year, when he got a job as a library page.</p>
<p>But he had no conventional extracurricular activities, and my husband and I placed strict limits on how much he could work – not so much in terms of hours per week as in terms of hours per day. There had to be time for homework. He got a job in a retail store at the start of the summer before his senior year and kept it throughout the school year. But because the store insisted on shifts a minimum of six hours in length, we insisted that he could only work on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday – and his boss accepted this restriction, assigning him to two of those three days every week. There was no way that we would let him work from 3 to 9 on, say, a Tuesday. There would be no way for him to get his homework done.</p>
<p>My daughter didn’t work for pay until the summer before college. She did have extracurricular activities, as well as a more demanding academic program (she was in IB; her brother wasn’t). </p>
<p>I think both of them made good choices, even though those choices were very different.</p>