In today’s world, it’s very hard not to hear about “Mental health”. It has become a social topic that gets discussed but it doesn’t ever get an actual deep dive into the topic of mental health. This problem of just discussing mental health can impact students not only in school but as they move on later in life and there are a lot of topics that just don’t get discussed.
One of these Mental Health topics that doesn’t get enough attention is continuing to work outside of work. This can lead to a bad problem with work-life balance, which isn’t uncommon.
Geoff Whiting defines this as, “Work-life balance is the amount of time you spend working compared to the time you spend pursuing things outside of work, measured in hours, enjoyment, or mental energy.”
Since first grade, students are expected to be doing some sort of classwork when they get home. On average, students spend almost an hour on schoolwork. This isn’t even considering the many students that have extracurriculars or advanced classes with higher expectations of the student regarding their after-school work. Not to mention any responsibilities they have around their house whether they have siblings to take care of or other chores that are part of living in the house.
This work-life balance can negatively affect quite a lot more individuals than people initially think. this limits our ability to socialize. This has been on a rapid decline since 2003, which contributes a big factor to declines in mental health. There are also more long-term effects of having a bad work-life balance like burnout.
Burnout often gets oversimplified quite a bit. It gets pushed into this category of either people being lazy or just stressed and I need to take a break but that’s not the problem and it often puts more stress on the person who’s already experiencing this work stress and pushes more towards a snowballing effect of this stress.
The main way to fix burnout can be simple but it is hard to implement and it is to change reduce, or rework hours and/or how to interact with work. So how does that Relate this to school, students should find a good work-life balance as they go on into their lives. As individual students there isn’t much that can be done as teachers though there are some things that can be done and a lot of them revolve around giving students choices over what they can do so they can choose something that will give them less stress or a better ability to show their skills and we already have students that are going to be teachers thinking about this
“Instead of having a test, you could offer a project or an essay or the test, like giving them options so that they don’t feel like they need to study for seven months for this test. They can just do a project that they feel good about and are demonstrating the same standards.” senior Ruby Pfeifer said.
As students graduate this is something to keep in mind as you try to find a job in the workplace or maybe your kids go off into high school is just how to make sure that there is a proper balance between home responsibilities and work and finding a good way to separate the two to live comfortably to live is stress-free to let yourself enjoy what you wanted to do for your work and that’s all this is for.
