Students do not have enough time to balance school and leisure activities. Most students want to play sports and do as many activities as possible, but that takes away from the other important things in life, like sleeping and eating.

Teens say that they love sleep, but do they really? According to the Nationwide Children’s Hospital, high schoolers are not getting near enough sleep every night. The average high schooler is supposed to get around nine to nine and a half hours of sleep every night. The truth is that they are getting around seven to seven and a half hours of sleep. It is like this because of the immense to-do lists that high schoolers have on a day to day basis.

Every child until at least the age of 16 is required by the Nebraska government to go to school. They are at school for seven hours a day, five days a week. Then they bring home an extra 30 minutes to two hours of homework that they must complete for the next school day. This could potentially be nine hours of school work every day, and then they still have to take care of their other non-school related activities.

Outside of school, students are also involved in other activities and clubs. These activities happen before or after school multiple times a week. Along with the other responsibilities that students have to deal with, it can be a lot to handle.

Some students are also involved in a multitude of sports whether they are through school or other outside corporations. These sports have practice more than once a week usually for an hour or two each time. Then there are the students that are in more than one sport who may have over 10 hours of sports practice every week.

Parents can sometimes be blamed for their students being so stressed. Some parents have to be involved with everything in their child’s life. A lot of the time parents put their kids in an abundance of activities because they never had the chance to do them when they were young. Although, there are a lot of people that actually want to be in all of these activities. 

The effects of an overloaded schedule can be stress or anxiety. According to a study done by Intrado, 45% of teens report being stressed all of the time. Relationships and teachers are some of the main reasons that they are stressed. Along with homework, they have other activities and extracurriculars which adds to the stress.

A student’s extracurricular activities should be well balanced with the rest of the activities they have going on in their life, if not they will no longer have fun doing what they love.  Being involved in school activities is a good thing, but when in too many activities it can cause students to be stressed and overworked.