We required our kids to work at 15. Summers. The occasional weekend. For S it meant not doing all the travel baseball he could have done. The lessons they learned were enormous. Like others have said, it helped their self confidence. Learning how to deal with different types of people including adults was huge. S even wrote about his experience in one of his admission essays. Both kids went from not knowing anything relative to their jobs when they started to becoming “in charge” until the manager comes back. Great leadership experience.