this may or may not be a useful way to think about it, but –
consider coming up with a few examples where you think most people would agree with some sort of intervention. (it’s highly likely that it’s much the same list you would have for going to the emergency contacts of your fully adult employees.)
now work backwards from those use cases to consider the policy needed for them.
(pretty easy example, imho: if $EMPLOYEE slips and falls at work and is knocked unconscious, call $EMERGENCYCONTACT with that information.)
like i said, it will probably have a whole lot of overlap with what you’d do for an employee of any age. heck, it may just be the same list. but it provides the double benefit of also firming up those policies for all your employees. better to have a plan before the emergency, right?
i will say that part of the duty of being a good boss may be to tell these new employees (who haven’t had the years to accumulate knowledge here) about the various minutiae here. explain what is going on, and give them the chance to rise to the occasion. for one thing, it means you are opting out of a nagging parent dynamic, and simply showing up in a different shape is going to be helpful to not getting the usual reaction. for another, you will give them the experience of getting used to the temperature of the water, basically! let them acclimate! you have a fantastic opportunity to help teach them.
i think that you may also want to think of things where you can assure your new employees that you WON’T contact their parents about. this is part of treating them like adults – if you see an adult employee who is, for instance, walking arm in arm with someone of the same sex, someone of a different race, someone of a different religion, or walking arm in arm with two at once (more than two and then the question becomes how did you hire an octopus). some of your employees may be very thankful for this! sometimes a teen that is highly motivated to work is because not working would mean relying entirely on their current parents or guardians, And That Is Not Going So Good. tell them up front that you’re not here to do that, and won’t be doing that. telling them that you plan to not share things like schedules with parents is also a good idea (let the teen share if they feel comfortable – and if not, then not). it will provide necessary reassurance to some applicants! especially those who are motivated to work for you because they’re trying to get the hell out of dodge! give them the gift of being treated decently, because some of them are not going to get much of that at home. you may find it rewarded with some incredible loyalty and willingness to put in hard work.
plus you give them a nice taste there of the work world works… or how it should work, anyway. that is very valuable as a lesson. it will let them head off future bullshit in the workplace, because you will have told them what’s normal (and normal doesn’t mean walls full of bees). that’s something people are supposed to kinda pick up as they go and is rarely explicitly said. so please do say it!
i would present this as something like an extended orientation or handbook for new workers – just explaining the details your adult hires already know, to an audience that may not know them, and leave your email etc open for specific advice. emphasizing that you’re employing them, not their parents, and are here to be their employer (and not their parents!) will reinforce that, too.
keeping the parents out of the loop at first and clearly defining roles will probably build you a lot of trust with teenagers who need it. but i would make some exceptions also for specific situations – and honestly, this is another thing where you can make the use case you agree is reasonable and work back. you probably already have this mental list of when you would reach out to loop someone’s emergency contact in on an issue, and it won’t be terribly different for teens! “if your mom calls and tells me that you’ve gotten in a car wreck and you had to ask her to call while you were waiting for the police, i am not going to say that was a no-show no-call” is already a reasonable policy you probably have in your head with “parent” replaced by “spouse/family member/roommate etc”. it can be a great time to nail down those policies and make sure they are enforced uniformly. but i would suggest that a third party getting roped in is something that *they* suggest, rather than *you* – and only for certain reasons, within certain limits.
i would also say that it may be important for teens to communicate to them that you will respect their schedule when it comes to school. simply the assurance that you will actually listen and not schedule them on, say, the day they are slated to take their AP Calculus exam, will assure a lot of your applicants that you are somewhere worth working for!
teenagers are sort of paradoxical in that as i have seen and experienced, the more you treat them like little kids, the more they will gravitate towards that default. the less you do that? the more they rise to the occasion. the most important thing to teach them is that standard in business that you get treated like an adult and not like a little kid. some may stumble here. but it’s not like no adults ever stumble on that hurdle either. (see: many examples from this blog, lol)