Monday, August 8, 2011

Parental Pressure

It seems these days that parents pressure their children so much that the children end up not knowing how to make their own decisions. I've seen countless people get pressured into doing certain extracurricular activities, like sports, being forced to take certain classes, being forced to work certain places and it sickens me. Too many people crack under the pressure their parents enforce on them. I've seen people have to go to therapy and get antianxiety meds because of all the stress.
I don't think that parents should relinquish all of their power over their child, but I do think this pressure has to stop. People always complain about peer pressure negatively affecting adolescents, but parental pressure poses a much bigger threat in my mind, because you cannot escape it. You have to live with them. And when it comes to school, forget about making your own decisions. Your educational career is not in your hands anymore. Parents can force you into taking classes you hate, and filling your schedule up with so many APs that you can barely breathe. The aftereffects of this are inevitable; students will either fail the class out of disinterest or the work being simply too hard for them.
It's not fair to teenagers to be forced into things like this. It leaves us constantly anxious that we won't finish something, always stressed, and flinching at loud noises we proceed to think are about to start turning into us getting yelled at. Not only does this affect our progress in school, but it also affects our home life. The more stress people face, the more they want to stay away from what stresses them; case in point being their parents.
Parents need to take a step back for once and instead of seeing one bad game and thinking their child is a horrible athelete, or seeing one bad grade and deeming them a failure, see that we are trying.

I know parents think trying isn't good enough, but when they incapacitate us with stress, what else are we supposed to do?

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