"You're young,” they say. "This is supposed to be the best time of your life. What do you have to lose?" How about my self-esteem, hope for the future and overall sanity? The teen years are the most stressful period in life. With school, peers, and social media influencing our every move our stress level has skyrocketed. It's gotten to the point that during our teen years all we want is a time machine to go back to being children.

School work stresses most teens out. We are expected to perform well in certain areas that do not appeal to us. Statistics show that 60% of teens are stressed out at some point, with school being the leading cause of stress.

We sit in our rooms alone with an immense amount of work haunting us on top of the test coming up tomorrow. So we study until the break of dawn just to manage a C. The people who are supposed to be on your side are your biggest critics. Parents expect us to be on the honor roll every semester, excelling in all of our activities, and never making mistakes along the way (like they did, right?). We break our backs trying to please everyone while weakening ourselves just for parents to tell us "it only gets worse from here."

Then there is the big C: College. For most high school students there is a time where you must decide on which college is right for you. But there are so many. We’re young; most of us don’t know what we want to do with the rest of our lives. This makes choosing a college even harder. Most of us want to be as far away from our parents as humanly possible but money always sets us back.

Finding a job as a teen is harder now than ever before. Most adults are now working in teen jobs because of money issues, making it even harder for us to find one. With no money, we put our hopes into scholarships (meaning we have to work harder in school to achieve them) and student loans (which means we’ll have a lifetime of debt).

So please, next time there is a big holiday dinner and you’re sitting across from your niece, or nephew or younger cousin think twice before you ask “what’s your life plan?”

Along with the immense amount of school work, we also must deal with our peers. We all crave to be accepted. This creates chaos as we spend all of our allowance for a pair of jeans to impress the people who only think of themselves. Then there is the media shouting at us everywhere we turn, telling us we need to change everything about ourselves in order to be liked.

Social media, peers, school, college, and the future all taunt us in the back of our minds until that one point where we collapse. We wake up in the middle of the night thinking about everything until we break down sobbing uncontrollably in our pillows ready just to give up. But we don’t. To achieve excellence we work hard until that point where we look at ourselves and say “we made it.”

So parents, which one do you know? The kid that smiling at you across the dinner table or the one that awakes in cold sweat 4 am?
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