Work/Life Balance Starts with School/Life Balance

We only have so many hours in a day and it can be difficult to strike a healthy balance between professional and personal obligations and between professional and personal pleasures. The education years of a young person’s life are the formative ones in which habits and mindsets get established that last into adulthood. So, why do we allow our high school students to live in a system of expectations that overburdens their time in a given day?

The school day is a set amount of hours of a teenager’s day, but the school doesn’t honor the fact that it was given that set amount of time, and instead wants to take over as much of a teenager’s day as possible. Think of all the ways a school works to take over those 24 hours: hours of homework, studying, test prep, extracurriculars, sports, and more. They don’t all fit inside of a school day. 

These demands are caused by many different forces. The modern students’ need to replicate each others’ over-stuffed transcripts means taking part in too many endeavors and organizations. Teachers operate in their insular classrooms and want every student to take their particular subject seriously and to prove that they are challenging the students, they assign mounds of homework which all compound across the daily bell schedule. This is all without taking into account parental expectations. These demands on time consume weekends, as well. Under these circumstances, students cannot give any of these challenges their complete focus and energy, perhaps not even the appropriate time that each requires. And we haven’t even begun to talk about the students’ actual interests and aspirations or the mental and emotional development that happens when kids are allowed to just be kids. Maybe addressing the mental health crises that we are seeing in our working population starts with adjusting what we are asking from our kids. And maybe it has something to do with recognizing that we all need time to figure out who we are and just be who we are.