Teenage Burnout? The idea seems a bit surprising, as well it should. According to a January 29 Newsweek article, a growing number of adolescents are finding their hyper-active schedules simply just too much. As a student who leaves for school at 7 a.m. and returns after 6 p.m. with hours of homework to do, I'm no stranger to long days and nights. Most teenagers walk around with a certain amount of stress, and an extremely active schedule can certainly add more to it. Burnout? That seems a bit of a leap. Why are kids driving themselves to the point where they do not have five minutes in a day to sit down and relax and then feel unhealthily exhausted by such a schedule?
My first thought was to think that it was caused by parental pressure. After all, "soccer mom" taken to the extreme can be a difficult situation for any kid to handle. It is parents who first send their young children to piano, violin, soccer, baseball, etc. It is absolutely wonderful that parents wish to give their children these kinds of opportunities. However, is the drive to see a child succeed in an ever more competitive world forcing children to make "leisure" activities stressful and more like a chore?
Kids never find the list of dizzying activities painful until they begin to look for a world outside the home. With the workload of high school (and in some cases junior high school) and an increased desire to just hang out and socialize, keeping a long list of activities is difficult and some kids can not handle that amount of juggling. One high school student interviewed in the Newsweek article, who frequently stayed up past midnight to maintain her 4.0 average, stated that she never goes to bed with the satisfaction that she has everything done.
Trying to determine where this pressure came from, I looked to my own experience. I know that my parents had me try a variety of activities when I was little. It was difficult to tell them I just wanted to quit when I simply grew tired of the activity and no longer found enjoyment in it. After a discussion, my parents would always give an understanding nod, even if I admitted that I would love to continue something but simply did not have the time anymore. They would never force me to continue an activity if I honestly no longer wanted to. If my parents did not put pressure on me to have a long list of extracurricular activities, then who?
The answer soon presented itself: me. Even the Newsweek article stated that the pressure of hyper-activity was prevalent among the most talented kids and was mostly self-induced. One would think the opposite: that talented kids do not feel any pressure to "prove themselves" and thus do not need a long list of activities for validation (and, conversely, that less talented kids would feel the need to be hyper-active). In my own experience, the most active teens in my school are extremely good students.
So why are talented kids feeling the need to prove themselves in a whirlwind of activities? Because everything is getting so competitive (especially college admissions), that being a straight A student is no longer enough to validate and set oneself apart. There are thousands and thousands of straight A students, so students today differentiate themselves by activities. Personally, I do not feel that someone should contrive interests in that way. A student should play soccer because he likes the sport, not so that some college will accept him or he can feel different from others. Knowing my feelings against such contrived interest, I began to examine my own crazy schedule: what was I doing this all for?
I have a dizzying list of activities because I love doing each and every one of them. Whether tutoring third graders in multiplication, writing, participating in a vigil for Tibetan freedom, playing the piano, singing, or going to a debate tournament for a weekend, I realize that I honestly enjoy all these activities. I do them because I want to; they are genuine interests. Perhaps that is why, unlike some, this hyper-active teen is far from burnout.