In 2021, 42% of high school students constantly felt sad emotions, and 29% experienced poor mental health. Having bad mental health due to school can not only affect your school life but many areas of your life that make you who you are and help develop you as a person.
High school is difficult, and can sometimes it can be easy to just set your feelings aside and focus on your homework. Whether you think so or not, at the end of the day, your feelings matter the most. Academic stress is serious, whether you are deciding whether you want to go to college or figuring out if you can even go to college with the grades you have. Having this stress makes you more likely to develop anxiety or depression. Research shows that students who achieve great academic standards are equally likely to develop poor mental health just as much as kids in poverty or recent immigrants can.
Studying for tests and being anxious to receive a good grade can cause stress, but so can homework. Students who spend more than two hours doing homework are reported to have higher stress levels and physical health issues. There is research that shows that reducing how much schoolwork you do outside of class can benefit your sleep and mental fitness. The consequences of too much homework for high school students range from a lack of balance in your life to isolating yourself from the rest of society, which can alter your mindset later in life. The same website also shows a statistic that more than 70% of students reported that they were always thinking and being stressed about school work, and 56% said homework was the main thing they were always stressed about. Lower than one percent of students said homework was not something they were stressed about in their daily lives.
Assigning lots of homework tends to not only make students not want to do it but can also lead to poor habits, such as cheating. School is not the only thing most students have to worry about. Around 10.2 million students participate in after-school activities, ranging from working a job to playing sports to participating in extracurriculars. It is recommended to have 10 minutes of homework per grade level per night, meaning high school students can have 90 minutes to 120 minutes of homework each night, although most spend about three hours. Not only that, but some students are the parent figure in their house, especially if they are struggling to get by. The American Psychological Association has reported that 1.4 million children between the ages of eight and 18 have to provide care for a parent or siblings.
Homework can affect students’ sleep in many ways. It is suggested for children between the ages of 13-18 to get around eight to 10 hours of sleep. Although that is the standard, 72.7% of high school students were reported as not getting enough sleep. It is a normal thing in our society to come home with loads of homework, due to teachers not giving work time in class, or not finishing what they were teaching. More homework means staying up late, cutting into your sleep time. When a student goes home with a load of homework, they realize they won’t have enough time to do anything else, so the first thing that they decide can be cut down is sleep. According to Liberty University, 20% of high school students pull all-nighters at least once a month, and 35% stay up until three in the morning to finish homework, which can hurt their academic performance.
Grades can also drop due to homework. Homework assignments are almost always graded, whether it is on completion or accuracy. When you don’t like something you are less likely to do it. Reasons for not doing homework can be because it gets in the way of other activities, it is hard to understand, they are afraid of failing, or simply because they just don’t want to do it. Some students don’t have the choice to do homework because 70% of teachers assign the homework online. That leads to 17% of students not being able to complete their homework due to not having access to high-speed internet/devices at home.
Believe it or not, students are not the only ones who dislike homework. A small amount of teachers prefer not to give homework, and others don’t see any benefits. One teacher has said that she believes home time is important, and that she doesn’t assign homework because she feels that it is a waste of energy to sit and do work at home. Multiple teachers said that they only started to assign homework because the parents begged them to. Another teacher said that homework can further separate the students, especially when they aren’t financially stable and need tutors. Whatever the reason is, many teachers dislike giving homework but somehow feel forced to give it anyway.
Next time you are trying to decide between cutting into your time for other things or cutting into your homework time, cut into your homework time. Bad habits can develop and not only will your stress levels rise, but you will start to isolate yourself from society and always be under pressure to finish something.
