As the school year winds down, many teenagers are starting summer jobs to earn money and gain experience. Businesses benefit from the seasonal influx of young workers across industries such as hospitality, construction, landscaping and retail.
Family businesses will also see many of their own return to the fold. Keeping work close to home can seem like the best way to keep teenagers safe. Parents know their children, and children know the family business.
Yet our recent research with Mariyam Rabbani and Anna Merrifield suggests that family employment does not automatically make work safer. In some cases, working for a parent may make safety conversations less frequent and may be linked to a greater risk of injury.
Early work experiences teach young people what is “normal” on the job, including whether it’s acceptable to refuse unsafe tasks or speak up when something feels wrong. Young workers are also already vulnerable because they are still learning tasks, hazards, expectations and workplace norms.
Research from Ontario’s Workplace Safety Insurance Board shows workers under 25 are four times more likely to be injured in their first month on the job than at any other time.
When family and work overlap
Our study examined 2,275 employed young workers in Ontario, aged 14 to 18. The data came from a larger young worker safety research program led by Sean Tucker, a human resource management professor at the University of Regina.
We were interested in whether working with or for a parent changes how young people communicate about safety.
We separated participants into four groups: those who did not work for or with a parent; those who worked for a parent’s business but not directly alongside them; those who worked alongside a parent but not in a parent-owned business; and those who both worked for and with a parent. About one in seven young workers in our sample had some form of parent-linked employment.
(AP Photo/Steven Senne)
We expected family involvement to help because it could provide more opportunities for parents to talk about safety and reduce the likelihood of work injuries.
That was not what we found.
Young people who worked for a parent reported less frequent safety communication than those with no parent-linked arrangement. Those who worked for a parent, or both for and with a parent, were more likely to report a lost-time injury.
The study does not prove that family jobs cause injuries. We did not have detailed information about industry, hazards or training quality. But the results challenge the assumption that family closeness automatically creates safer work.
Familiarity can become a shortcut
The problem may be that family relationships make safety feel obvious when it isn’t.
In a typical workplace, a new teen worker is visibly new. A supervisor knows they need orientation, training and closer supervision. In a family business, the same teenager may have grown up around the work. They may know the physical space, the people in the business and the rhythms of working there. That familiarity can be useful, but it can also produce dangerous assumptions.
Parents may assume their child already knows what to do. Teenagers may feel pressure to prove themselves capable and hesitate to ask basic questions for fear of looking immature or lazy. A safety reminder from a parent may register as family advice rather than a workplace instruction.
The relationship is doing double duty. A parent is also a boss and a child is also an employee. A family favour can become a work assignment, and a quick helping hand can become exposure to a hazard. That overlap is exactly why safety needs to be made more explicit, not less.
What parents and family businesses can do
As teenagers head into summer jobs, the message for parents and family businesses is not to avoid hiring young family members. It is to stop assuming that love, trust and familiarity are enough.
Parents should treat the job as a real job. That means explaining tasks, hazards, training, supervision and the limits of the role before the first shift, even if the young person has been around the business for years.
The conversation should be concrete. What tasks are they allowed to do? What is off limits? Who supervises them? What protective equipment do they need? What should they do if they are unsure or feel unsafe? What happens if they make a mistake or report an injury?
Family relationships can make work feel informal, but occupational risks do not become informal because the employer is a parent. A young worker still needs training, supervision, clear expectations and permission to speak up.
The same applies to teenagers. Working for family does not mean assuming everything is already understood. Asking questions is not disrespectful; it is part of learning to work safely.
A family job can be a good summer job. It just shouldn’t be an informal one.
