Do Australian Teenagers Work? Why We Should Care

Abstract

This paper addresses the lack of systematic attention to teenagers' work in feminist economics. Drawing on historical sociology, it suggests why paid or unpaid work by children has been difficult to discuss, define, and measure in contemporary industrialized countries, in part by comparing debates on child workers and “economically inactive” housewives. The paper then asks whether mothers' increasing workforce participation has led to a rise in the number of children whose labor is “domestically useful.” The answer, focusing on Australian research, considers ethnographies of teenagers who resist housework, accounts of those who make substantial contributions to their families, surveys of children's employment, and data from national time-use surveys. The paper concludes that the interdependence of all family members should be considered in one analytical frame.

Keywords:

• Housework
• teenagers
• household division of labor
• Australia
• time budget surveys
• child labor

JEL Codes:

• J13
• J16
• J22

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The statistical analysis in this paper was initially funded by two small research grants from the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University. Over the years, the statistical analysis was capably and generously carried out by my colleague Justin Bowd. Even though Justin did not contribute any new material to this paper, the argument owes a great debt to his work. In revising the text, I benefited greatly from the detailed and constructive comments of four anonymous reviewers.

Notes

This paper uses the terms “teenagers” and “young people” synonymously. The term “children” is also employed, both in a more general sense, as in those below the age of majority, and as a general designation of parents' sons and daughters.

In Australia and the United Kingdom, the more neutral term “young carers” corresponds to some meanings of “parentified” or “adultoid” children.

Zelizer coined these terms to highlight a transition from a nineteenth-century regime where US courts typically awarded damages for the wrongful injury or death of a child on the basis of the lost potential economic contribution such child would make to his or her parents, to one where courts allocated damages according to the child's emotional value. In these latter calculations, a child's worth is seen as proportional to the investment parents made in his or her upbringing and inversely related to his or her economic usefulness.

Zelizer coined this term in the last chapter of Pricing the Priceless Child, where she reflected on the possibility of a new social transition in which children may again become invaluable productive participants in a cooperative family unit.

There were 7,056 respondents in the 1992 survey, 7,260 in 1997, and 6,902 in 2006. Our analysis was restricted to teenagers who were 15 to 19 years old and lived in single-family households with their parent(s). Teenagers were excluded where no parental time-use data were available. In all, there were 558 teenagers meeting the above criteria in the 1992 sample, 511 in 1996, and 486 in 2006. The Australian time-use surveys are designed to represent households across Australia. Although this in itself does not guarantee that the teenage subsample is representative of all Australian 15- to 19-year-olds, we have grounds for believing that this is the case. In each survey, respondents were asked to record all their activities in five-minute intervals over two days. Our analysis only deals with the primary activities recorded by respondents. The figures are derived from the total time reported for each activity per person divided by the number of diary days (almost always two) that the person supplied. The categories and other details of the surveys are described in the relevant Users' Guides (ABS 1997b, 2006b).

For instance, the instrument for recording the presence or absence of a disability changed between surveys; income data varied from values to ranges to deciles. In 2006, activities qualifying as domestic or childcare expanded slightly and there were more weekend days.

Since teenagers tend to perform more housework on weekends (and there were more weekends in the latest survey), these figures are likely to overestimate young people's participation in domestic work.