The Teenage Struggle, Lifes So Hard

In our English class we are doing a project that is called You and the World. Basically this project is when the students in our ninth grade English class were we research deeper into societal issues of today, and look more into what we can do to help the problem or get closer to ending it.

What my You and the World project is about is Teen Stress. I chose this topic to research in one because, I didn't a lot of other topics in mind. But more importantly two, because this is a problem that I face myself and see a lot of other teenagers around me struggle with as well and I see this a big problem in our society the is overlooked a lot of times, and can be hard for people to deal with.

The reason I am interested in this project because I think that some of the studies show some really crazy things that you would have never thought of. We all know that adults always have a lot on their plates to deal with ranging from bills and things to even taking care of their own child. But could you think through all of that your child has a higher stress level than the adult. Now you may be thinking well they are an adult they know how to deal with that better, but it is still a valid problem, and teenagers should be able to get the help earlier in their lives so they will be able to deal with it.

This image is showing actually displayed a mostly accurate portrayal of a lot of the things that can cause teen stress.

You see a good amount of these things do not really actually involve the teen but is more of a mental thing. Like the fitting in, or the expectations. These are things that can be problematic for some, but it just takes someone to be there for them and help them out when they are feeling a little down. Like the fitting in, I don’t think people should worry about fitting in with everyone else and maybe just get more of quality friends than quantity of friends. And expectations can be a really hard one for people because I have to deal with this problem all the time in my life, and it happens when people know how well you can do and push you to always do that 120% amount of work that they know you can, and that is very stressful on people. Because we start to feel like if we don’t meet the expectations that we aren't doing good enough. I think that people should be able to work as much as what is comfortable with them and be able to push themselves sometimes, which is different from always having someone do it for you.

Since I have already done a good deal of research on my topic, I am starting to ponder upon many different ideas that we could do to help teens deal with stress that they have so that maybe we can bring the level down from a 5.8/10 to the average of 3.9/10. Whether it be from something as large making everyone teen instantly nice to each other and make everyone get along. To something like spreading awareness enough so that it reaches out to the genuinely nice people who might take time out of their own day to help a teen or anyone for that matter not feel as stressed or depressed.

Annotated Bibliography