Teenager’s mental health is often affected by many things including home life, work life, past trauma, and present issues going on, but one of the main things I hear teenagers say is that they are affected by school. Although school is important for your future, I believe your mental health is too and other people agree as well.

I’ve read multiple articles about this topic and most of them have similar opinions to what I have to say. School can be draining for a lot of students. It takes energy to wake up early, come to school for 7-8 hours, and go home and do homework on top of all that. I don’t think homework should be mandatory for all students unless they believe they need help or if it’s for a project or something similar to that. Most kids just want to go home and relax when they get home but instead, they go home to more work and more stress. According to School Stress Takes A Toll On Health, Teens And Parents Say, homework is another leading cause of stress.“A little stress is a good thing,” Alvord says. Alvord, being one of the people being interviewed about this topic agrees with the fact that stress can be good for students sometimes, they also say too much stress can backfire, which I agree with. I think in certain situations stress is a good motivator but too much stress can affect you very heavily in mental and physical ways.

Many students give negative feedback when asked about how they feel at school and how it impacts them. A prime example of this is from an article I read, The Study of Students Feelings Towards Mental Health. In the article, the writer says how they did a survey and found that 75% of the kids who responded, only had negative feedback. After I read this article, I wanted to see for myself what some other students had to say about school so I made my survey and had them answer some questions about school and stress. I asked them on a scale of 1-10 how stressed they felt at school as the first question and the lowest number I got was four and the highest being ten. I also added an open-ended response about how they felt at school and got many answers talking about how they feel stressed a lot of the time. One of my favorite responses talked about how school can be fun when seeing your friends and some teachers but how it’s also mentally and physically draining.

You should be able to balance your life between school and home. Based on my survey, about 77% of people answered that school affects their home life too, I believe this is okay to a certain extent but when it comes to them feeling stressed about school at home too, I think that’s too much. Students are worried that if they don’t do good they are not going to lead a good life. I believe if they are doing their best that’s all that matters in the end.