Honored Isolation?

Kay S. Hymowitz on children, the decline of the summer job and the rise of internships:

In the junior-high and early high-school years, middle-class strivers spend summers at soccer, hockey, swim, diving or baseball camp to sharpen their athletic skills; they go to science, computer and arts camp to pump up their academic records. In their junior or senior year they jet off to exotic destinations to fill in the international travel/community service credential, building huts in Guatemala, supervising nursery-schoolers in South Africa or, as one company offers, reforesting fruit trees in Fiji. And then, finally, for many older teens, it's an internship, a part-time, usually unpaid, job-lite at an office in a business or nonprofit organization.

There's little question that the demise of the summer job is due in part to globalization. For one thing, with millions of low-skilled immigrants around, service industries don't need to rely on kid labor the way they used to. Lawn-care companies and fast-food restaurants can now employ a more permanent adult staff. And, according to Neil Howe, an expert on age cohorts, kids are so used to seeing immigrants doing that sort of work that they assume "I don't have to mess with food or cleaning stuff up." Ironically, the same kids whose parents are paying $4,000 for them to go to Oaxaca to build houses for the poor can't imagine working for money next to Mexican immigrants at the local Dunkin' Donuts.