“You’re too young to be stressed out,” say most adults working nine-to-fives and coming home to a house they’ve carefully curated over the years. Maybe it’s the lives they’ve made for themselves or the experiences that they’ve undergone over their lives that drive them to say something so insensitive to the youth.

If anything, students have more of a right to be stressed than adults do. I mean, we wake up every day to go to a place that we never asked to be in and then come home to a house we have little to no say in, just to do it all over again, five days a week. With strict dress codes, hours of homework, and grades often defining our worth, it is hard not to get stressed out. Understandably, adults have it harder with responsibilities, financial struggles, job security, and family issues. But the way I see it, they applied for that job, they agreed to pay that rent, and they have the ability to make choices that can directly impact their lives, while we do not have as much control..

I find myself having no free time, no time to express myself. I used to feel motivated when it came to school work, but the older I get, the more I find myself asking, “What’s the point?” To spend hours with people I couldn’t care less about? To learn mathematics that I see as having no purpose in my life? It is an endless tunnel of questions that flush through my brain while I sit in health class at eight in the morning. I also find that this feeling affects some of my peers even more than it does me.

 Around 20% of teenagers experience depression sometime during their adolescence; that’s one in five students that you walk past every day. The ages of thirteen to eighteen are hard years for everyone. Our bodies and mentality are going through changes. Your life might be flipped upside down one random day by a boy or girl you just met. Even through all of that, I have found that the main stem of mental illness in kids my age has been a lack of control. When you spend your days under the control of adults, you tend to feel helpless and lonely.

I do believe that success should be earned. Freedom should not be. For example, I once asked to switch out of a class I had been struggling in, and I was unable to switch to another class. I see how teens can be viewed as reckless and untrustworthy, but they’re so much more than that. Imagine having 6 periods with 6 different teachers.  In many ways, this is the same as having 6 different jobs, with 6 different expectations, 6 different sets of classroom rules, and 6 different personalities to get along with. That’s a lot to endure every day. Teens’ IQs are the same, if not higher than adults’, they tend to be more creative, and they often think deeper than adults do. So why is it that teens have so little control over their lives?

When you open up a search engine and ask the question of why teens have little to no control over their lives, you’ll get the answer of “immature brain development.” Which is understandable to an extent; teens shouldn’t be able to own homes or watch rated R movies, but they should be able to decide when and where they learn and practice their hobbies.

Adolescents are trapped in a school that some days might feel like a prison. While I understand that school is not a prison, and this may seem like a dramatic statement, there are some themes that FEELS like a prison. For example, students legally have to attend school for eight hours, and are only given a very limited amount of absence allowance. They then come home to a house where, for some, they have no control over anything and can rarely even get their opinion out without being reprimanded. Teachers and parents often view mistakes and learning curves as crimes. Instead of turning it into a lesson, it’s made into a prison sentence.

We should have more say over our lives, with the balance and support of adults. Being “caged” physically causes you to feel caged mentally (of course, students are not literally caged, but it can feel like it sometimes). Instead of adults dismissing the stress that students undergo, they should ask why so many young people feel a lack of control in their own lives. Control doesn’t have to mean total freedom, but it should mean having a voice. School and home can sometimes feel like places where there isn’t much room for mistakes. Students should be given the room to learn from their mistakes instead of just being reprimanded for them. The only way for students to gain confidence and courage is to let them build and experience a life that they are comfortable in, not something that was built for them.