In this day and time, most high school students are always doing something. Most teenage students have to juggle sports, school, a social life, jobs and volunteering, which can get overwhelming, and very stressful.
Some people may say that student responsibilities are essential in preparing them for adulthood, but responsibilities aren’t exactly something that you can learn how to do, you just do them. Teenagers should be spending their teenage years discovering who they are, what they want to be, rather than going to work, rather than doing five hours of homework every night. Students spend so much time worrying about tasks that supposedly will help them in the future, that anxiety cripples them and they never spend enough time actually thinking about what they want to do in the future, where they want to live, or what they want as a career.
Students usually tend to have a much longer list of mandatory responsibilities than adults, and with this comes stress. Students who worry too much about school, work, etc., tend to have depression, anxiety, or burnout. According to Business Insider, students in Finland have one of the best educations in the world, and part of the reason is because they have a lot less homework. Which goes to show, that less responsibilities means less stress for students, and less stress means students do a lot better in school.
Although there are many responsibilities that add to student stress, according to the Canadian Education Association , 33.2% of students found that school (homework, tests, etc.) was the “greatest stressor” for them. Many of today’s students would say that they are pressured by peers and family into having good grades, creating friends and being social, staying fit, and having a job, adding up to a lot of stress, which has negative impacts both physically and mentally on someone. Since a teenager’s body is still developing, all this negative stress can cause damage to the person in the long run, thus proving that too many responsibilities have more negative than positive impacts on students.
It’s been shown that too much anxiety and stress (mostly resulting from too many responsibilities) at the emotional developmental time that teens are going through, can result in mental health issues when they are adults.
Responsibilities should be saved for adulthood, when people are actually ready to deal with the stress that comes with them. Your teenage years should not be spent worrying about a job, or whether or not you are the best on your sports team. That kind of pressure and worry takes a toll on people, especially teenagers. Teenagers with too many responsibilities, with too much stress can result in unhealthy adults, which is why an overload of responsibilities is not meant for teenagers, but for prepared, and responsible adults.
Feature image courtesy of: http://stress.lovetoknow.com/Stress_Causes_of_College_Students
