One stereotype is that teenagers are lazy and carefree, but this study says otherwise:

Canadian teens averaged 7.1 hours of unpaid and paid labour per day in 2005 – a 50-hour work week, virtually the same as that of adult Canadians aged 20 to 64 doing the same activities.

Personally, I felt a pretty big burden lift once I’d graduated college; there was no longer any project or paper looming in the near future which required weekend or evening attention. I now had legitimate time off. It was a wonderful realization.

Paid work is a big thing right now for teens too. Calgary has a tremendous labour shortage going on right now, and most of Western Canada (and perhaps further east) is in a similar situation. With demand for labour rising (taking wages along with it), people who wouldn’t work otherwise are drawn into the labour force… and a big part of that pool is teenagers in high school. I see them all over the place in retail jobs; some look around 14. That wasn’t the case when I was that age; finding a job was difficult (as there were plenty of out-of-work adults with experience who would work full-time for those low-end jobs) so most of my peers and I didn’t bother.

For me, the most distasteful part of the article is this:

Homework was the most time-consuming unpaid activity for teens, with 60 per cent averaging two hours, 20 minutes every day.

When you consider that most homework (especially at the high school level) is unproductive busy-work, this amounts to a huge loss of productivity and an increased stress burden. That doesn’t benefit anybody.