Children Need Balance

Balance. Life is all about balancing. Balancing your time, your friends, your family, and your pets. Balancing activities and school or work. No matter what you do, life needs balance. Balance, though it might not seem like it, is hard for a thirteen year old like myself. Life is busy, especially for someone like me who has outside of school commitments and priorities. I play soccer. A lot of soccer. And soccer on top of homework makes it very hard for me to balance my free time and my work time. I find myself staying up late at night to finish assignments, instead of getting the 9½ hours of sleep recommended for people my age. This is mostly because of the amount of homework that we have during the week and the weekend, which as well as inducing lots of stress, is very time consuming. I believe that students in middle school should not have weekend homework. Middle school is a time where children are turning into teenagers. It is a time when people are changing and finding out who they want they are, and who they want to be. The importance of having homework is something I understand (as long as it is related to the class and not just busy work), but sometimes it is too much. We need the privilege of enjoying life to the fullest without worrying about the things that come with adulthood (like paying taxes). Young people need time for themselves, and they should not be denied that for anything, especially if that something is taking over their lives. Now I might just be a kid, writing this because it was assigned to me, but I am telling the truth. We kids need to enjoy the experience of just being kids.