Now, that attitude may not be accurate. Maybe working at McDonald's or some other typical teenage employment provides valuable experience or some skills that will be relevant to their adult life. However, few if any middle-class parents tell their kids that, because they don't want to encourage them. For kids to get used to working a minimum wage job -- to get a taste of self-sufficiency too early -- to believe that life is possible without college -- these are not things that ambitious middle-class parents and teachers want for their kids. They don't want their kids to see life as a highway with exit ramps and rest stops at various points along the way. They want their kids to see life as a railroad to lucrative professional employment, with any departure from the path resulting in a catastrophic derailment.
Also, any money that a teenager earns before college only raises the amount that the teen is expected to contribute to their college expenses, effectively lowering their financial aid.
The experience of being paid according to your actual value, particularly when you're young and virtually worthless, is an important lesson you don't find in academics or extracurriculars.
"One of my earliest childhood jobs involved shoveling manure at my uncle's dairy farm in upstate New York. Things were going well until my uncle explained that no matter how well I performed, I would never be promoted to farmer. Or even cow. I had hit the manure ceiling.
I consider that experience my first economic stimulus package—the unwelcome realization that my current job was a dead end. While my classmates were building snowmen with carrot noses (mostly the girls) and carrot genitalia (mostly the boys), I started to do some serious career planning about how to get out of the fecal relocation profession and into the warm embrace of a loving corporation. I studied hard, and I earned money for college by mowing lawns, shoveling snow, shoveling even more manure, and (my personal favorite) shoveling frozen manure covered with snow. I saved my meager funds, and with the help of my parents, who both took extra jobs, plus a few scholarships, I clawed my way into college."