Having to come home in a dirty shirt from the restaurant they work for at 10 at night, and still needing to spend an hour finishing their math homework. 11:30 p.m. rolls around and they finally get to sleep, this 17 year-old enters a vicious cycle of low sleep and high stress levels.

I’m going to assume that the average student over 16 years of age goes to school all five days, drives there, and has three and a half hours of homework a day (from a survey of 1,000 K-12 teachers on usnews.com). That’s 52.5 hours a week dedicated to school. Now add two hours to that total per day, which some students use for sports or an activity after school. Now 66.5 hours a week for school work and activities.

On a good night, most high school students will sleep for seven hours even though recommended sleep time is nine and a quarter hours (nationwidechildrens.org). Now the total is at 115.5 hours per week used for school activities and basic necessities (and I haven’t included eating).

If you take all the hours in one week, and subtract it from the total, you now have 52.5 hours over a seven day week for free time. A measly seven and a half hours per day, which again is being generous on the amount for sports, activities, eating and homework. Not only do some students do all of this, they may have to drive siblings around, attend church and on top of it all work a part time job, making around eight dollars an hour.

How does that make any sense?

With the amount of time put into school, which for me can turn into an all day thing (seven in the morning to nine at night), school becomes a job. Every day I spend seven hours at school and then either stay after for seven more to work on the newscast, or go home and do two hours of homework. That is a minimum of nine hours, sometimes 14.

Money is important, but is not personal sanity more important? I am lucky enough to not have to work daily to support myself, I have my parents to thank for that, but some of my peers are not as lucky. Some kids have to work directly after school for at least four hours, sometimes more.

If school takes up as much time as a full time job, it is fully unreasonable to expect high school students to take on double digit hours per week on top of spending at minimum 84 hours a week at school or sleeping. Loss of time can affect social skills and mental health, as a study done by the American Society on Aging proved that people with robust social relationships have a 50% increase in survival rates.

When an adult has a full time job, the average hours are 9-5, five days a week. Simple. Occasionally depending on situation, it may be extra time here and there. That is almost exactly the same amount of time students spend on school work in total. It is completely backward to expect teenagers, whose brains are most vulnerable and changing at any time in their lives to spend more hours working in total than full grown adults.

I’m not saying that students should never work and that having a job is crazy. The crazy part is how parents expect their kids to work a ton and try to support themselves making $7 per hour after taxes, and without a whole lot of extra time to do so. Just like anything else in life, teenage working should happen in moderation.