Help your teen grab a summer job and make the most of the money

Here's a summer "enrichment" program that will be really good for your teen: a low-skills, low-pay, grind-it-out summer job. There's little that's better for introducing responsibility, self-confidence, new friends, and some walking-around cash.

Not to mention appreciation for all of the education you expect your teen to get.

But this year, jobs are in short supply. The Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University is projecting historically low teen employment levels for the summer of 2007. Here's how to help your kid grab a job and make the most of the money he or she earns:

It's not just the obvious employers like camps, swimming pools, and ice cream stands that hire for the summer, suggests Shawn Boyer of Snagajob.com, an employment site that specializes in hourly jobs. He says he's seeing more teen jobs being listed by nontraditional employers, such as banks looking for tellers and merchandising companies looking for workers to restock shelves.

It's often the neatly dressed, polite person who walks in the door at the right moment who gets the summer retail job. Tell your teen to fill out every application he's offered, and to fill it out completely.

"That means if you don't have any work experience, you list your extracurricular activities and leadership positions," Boyer says.

It's sad, but not uncommon, to find college graduates who don't know the first thing about income tax withholding, FICA, and other "surprises." When your daughter gets her first check, go over it. Explain the difference between gross and net and where all the deductions go.

After working all week, she's likely to blow some of her cash buying text minutes, or music, or a too-expensive trendy top you know she won't wear more than three times. That's her prerogative, and it's what's great about earning money.

A Roth IRA is one of the best investments teens can make. This year, a working teen can put as much as he earns into a Roth IRA, up to $4,000.

That money can sit, untouched, for most of his life and really put him ahead of the grade when he's older.

Even without another dime being added, it would compound to over $215,000, tax-free, over 50 years. Or, he could pull money out without penalty and use it for college or a house.

The youth advantage of Roth accounts isn't just in the long-term compounding. Roth contributions are made with after-tax income, but since teen income is rarely high enough to produce much of an income tax burden, it's usually a painless way to make a contribution without having to pay a lot in taxes on the money that's contributed.

If you can afford to contribute to your child's Roth (after you've filled your own), you may want to match his contributions to encourage this savings habit.

If they are old enough to be employed, they should be able to have their own checking accounts. Not every bank will open a checking account for someone under 18, however, so shop around and check with your credit union. If you want to start a teenager off with some training wheels, you can set up a joint account, so that your name is on it, too. Then you can both go over monthly statements, and use those sessions as teaching opportunities for such subjects as debit card use, balancing checking accounts, and the like.

You may be providing the car and the insurance and the costly gasoline that enables your kid to work. That's OK. But make sure he understands their cost. Having a job is great, but it's not free.

Linda Stern is a freelance writer. She can be reached at lindastern@aol.com.