A lingering effect of the Great Recession — and something else made worse by the economic uncertainty brought about by the Obama administration’s capricious policies — is a high youth unemployment rate.

But there’s great value in having a summer job, and parents and grandparents should encourage kids to seek on in the coming weeks.

“Among the signs of my advancing age is bafflement at hearing younger parents talk about what their teenagers are going to do over the summer,” wrote Dave Shiflett in the Wall Street Journal. “Some mention internships with documentary filmmakers. Others say that their offspring will spend the hot months building latrines in distant corners of the developing world.”

Those are important activities, Shiflett said, but they don’t have the same value as a real job — where hard work is rewarded with a paycheck, and teenagers learn they’re not “the center of the universe.”

“Sadly, one of the biggest challenges facing today’s teenage worker is finding a job at all,” Shiflett noted.

He cited a J.P. Morgan Chase report which says only 46 percent of young people who apply for work this summer will find it (and that doesn’t count the ones who are too discouraged by the numbers to even apply).

Here’s why that’s important, according to a 2014 study by the Brookings Institute.

“Finding and keeping a job is a key step in a young person’s transition to adulthood and economic self-sufficiency,” the study found. “Employment obviously allows young people to cover expenses for themselves and their families, but it also provides valuable opportunities for teens and young adults to apply academic skills and learn occupation-specific and broader employment skills such as teamwork, time management, and problem-solving. Additionally, it provides work experience and contacts to help in future job searches.”

In fact, “Among teens, employment should be considered complementary to education, since the first priority is to attend school full-time and complete high school. However, evidence suggests that teen employment is associated with improved employment and earnings outcomes later in life,” the study found.

There’s a big difference between volunteer work, an unpaid internship or mission trip, and actual employment. With service work, the reward is often praise. Kids get enough of that nowadays. What they don’t get is a taste of what it’s like to succeed and fail, based on one’s own efforts, in the real world.

Shiftlett, in the Journal, recalls some of his first jobs.

“Most of these jobs were anything but glamorous,” he wrote. “Newspaper delivery, for example, was the first rung on many an economic ladder. The paperboy (or girl) had to rise early, pull heavily laden wagons up and down dark streets, and later go door-to-door collecting money from customers.”

And older workers were also part of the educational experience.

“The older workers didn’t take us young bucks very seriously, but if we paid attention, we could learn a few things from them, including something about the dignity of common labor,” he wrote.

There’s value in a summer job. Even if it’s hard to find.