by Kat Stovall

Created on: May 21, 2007   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

Anyone that says that teenagers have no pressure has got to be completely removed from his/her own teen years. Not having been a teenager for only seven years now and not having much of a life as a teen the remembrance of the nightmare called teen years is fresh in my brain. Pressure in a teen's life is growing everyday. So where does the pressure come from? Everywhere.

I am not addressing the ultra spoiled well off teenagers many have thought of when approaching this subject. I am thinking of the average teen boy or girl. There is more pressure on teens to do well in school and to attend college now than any other era of the past. Many teens must work to help support their families. Peer pressure is still pounding away in their ears on the subjects of sex, drugs, and image. There is a higher pressure for children to join sports and other extracurricular activities now, in hopes of gaining scholarships.

As a teen I had a troubled life. I came from your typical white middle class family on the outside but inside I was a scary person. Following years of physical abuse I became out of control. By fourteen I was a drug addict. By fifteen years old I was in foster care. By sixteen I was in rehab. After surviving the worse three years of my life I finally came home emancipated from my parents and free of my drug addiction. I was supporting myself working two jobs and going to high school at seventeen. I dropped out of high school and got my GED so I would have more time to work and more money to pay the bills. I became a mother a month after my eighteenth birthday and again a month before my nineteenth birthday. My nineteen year old husband and I raised our own children. We worked hard, paid our own bills, and worked to better ourselves. Now at 26 we own our own home, have had our own business, own both our vehicles, both have great jobs, I am currently enrolled as a Criminal Justice Major, and we have three healthy and wonderful children. After all the sucess that I have earned I still cringe at the thought of being a kid again. The pressures were great and the rewards at the time far to few.

These hardships that I have talked about in my own life are all too familiar to the majority not the minority of teenagers today. We as adults complain often of the forty hour work week, of towering stacks of bills, and of the prices of health care. Imagine having all this responsibility as a teen and add on to it a 40 hour school week and an average of twenty hours homework a week.

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