Teens who work and also attend school at the same time have been decreasing their performance in school due to working long hours at their job. Long working hours lead to lowering teens’ academic achievement. Spending over four to seven hours a day at work during the week gives teens less time to get school work done. This causes teens to feel overwhelmed and not have enough time to get their work done on time.
One mother explains her concern for her son working long hours and not taking care of his studies: “He’s been required to clean up after the store closes and often doesn’t get home until past midnight on school nights… How can my son take care of his studies and be made to work late at night?” This explains that teens working long hours, sometimes past midnight, don’t have time to focus on their school work. This is decreasing their academic achievement.
It also is leading to poor mental health and well-being. Working twenty hours or more a week while in school causes a lot of stress and health problems. Teens get a lack of sleep due to them working long then staying up all night finishing school work.
Teens focus on making money so they can save up, but they also focus on maintaining good grades so they can graduate and be successful. Too much stress can cause a change in behavior, and teens are finding different solutions to decrease the stress, such as drug use. “Researchers show that working during the school year can impede high school performance and cause behavior problems, such as drug use and delinquency.” Trying to balance two important things at once is very stressful, and teens seek bad solutions to reduce stress.
Finally, it causes a lack of motivation and interest in school. When teens work more than twenty hours a week during the school year, it causes them to lose focus and not want to do school work anymore.
“Teens who work more than 20 hours a week are less likely to finish high school.” Teens are overworked because they put in more hours at their jobs instead of putting more hours into doing school work. Working for a long time during the week instead of focusing on more time doing school work can cause less interest in actually focusing on school.
Due to the long shifts they put in at work, teens who work and go to school at the same time have been performing worse academically. Companies should decrease the extended working hours of school-attending teens in order to raise those teens’ low academic performance.
