Living In USA

Partly because of summer heat but mostly because we began as an agricultural nation, summer holidays are very long. Children and youth get restless if they have nothing to do, especially when they are living in cramped city apartments. As a result, there are thousands of different kinds of summer camps for children. They are run by many organizations such as the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, YMCA, YWCA, or religious institutions. There are also many private camps, which, although expensive, provide horseback riding, skilled instruction in various specialties, wilderness trips, and the like.

Older teenagers are more likely to seek summer jobs or go off with their own age groups on camping or other trips. Many go backpacking in the mountains. Anyone living in a city apartment may want to encourage such summer prospects for their young people.

Many teenagers earn a portion of their college expenses by working during the summer at such jobs as deckhand, waiter, clerk, harvester, construction worker, camp counselor, baby-sitter, gas station attendant, telephone operator, or messenger. American teenagers are not concerned with status. Being unskilled, they try to find jobs at whatever level they can, seeking not only money but also experience. They learn work skills, responsibility, and the ability to take orders and to get along with a boss and new kinds of people. As they grow older and more competent, most teenagers get better jobs, probably still unskilled but more closely tied to their fields of interest — in hospitals, political headquarters, newspapers, schools, or wherever. Students from abroad should check carefully into visa regulations, however, if they want to use the long holidays in this way. The dean or foreign student adviser at any school should be able to offer advice here, but the visa question should be raised in one's home country before leaving.