Parents are “taxing” their live-at-home children who take part-time jobs, according to new research.
A study finds that many parents withhold the pocket money they would normally have given their teenage children if they work. The study found that parents are, however, more generous with their cash when their children are approaching their exams, possibly with a view to limiting their working hours.
Dr Angus Holford, senior research officer at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex, studied data on 5,000 girls and 5,000 boys across a two-year period, between the ages of 14 and 16.
The study: Do Parents Tax Their Children? Teenage Labour Supply and Financial Support, based on data from the past decade, the most recent available, also found significant gender differences when it came to part-time working.
At age 14, 25% of boys but only 19% of girls had a part-time job. But, by 16, girls had overtaken the boys. Almost a third, 32%, against 29% of boys, had a part-time job. However, the gender pay gap appears to start early on in life. Girls were earning £4.06 an hour against £4.34 an hour for boys, based on an average 6.5 hours of work a week.
Holford suggested the disparity was down to the fact that girls tended to mature faster than boys and were therefore more employable.
“Boys get things like paper rounds relatively early and then, later on, when they are allowed to do proper jobs, say in shops and bars, girls make more attractive employees and they therefore have more opportunities.”
Over the period studied, around four-fifths of both boys and girls could expect to receive some form of allowance from their parents.
This was an important factor in determining whether they took a part-time job. “There’s this negative association,” Holford said. “If they’re getting money from their parents they are less likely to work.”
The study found that, at age 14, children were between 10 to 15 percentage points less likely to work if they were receiving an allowance. This increased to 20 percentage points by age 16.
Similarly, parents were around 15 percentage points less likely to give an allowance if their child was in paid work.
“Parents are using this soft power of being able to withhold this money from their children,” Holford said. “The parents don’t want to say ‘you’ve got this small wage packet, give some of it to me,’ but it’s very easy for them to give their child a bit less pocket money than before [if their child is working].”
However, the analysis suggests that parents are more likely to give regular pocket money to teenagers who have a hard time finding a job.
These include children who are younger within their academic year and are at a disadvantage when vacancies arise in the autumn, those in unemployment blackspots and those in areas with few shops.
Holford said this suggested that parents were “insuring” their children against labour market difficulties. While they would like their children to finance their own spending, it showed that they were prepared to help them out if necessary.
