One thing I haven’t seen in the comments is the pressure and expectation that you are supposed to be an excellent student and get into a good school and/or get scholarships. The pressure and work pushed onto kids from a young age is staggering.
I graduated HS in 2006. I feel like I was on the early-ish side of “must get very good grades, have multiple extra curriculars, and get into a good school.” I had 4-6 hours of homework a night after sitting in school all day and having a 2-2.5 hour sports practice or a game (which was even more of a time commitment). I was often up until midnight or later and waking up at 6:15-6:30 on weekdays. Weekends were used for more practices and more homework. Even when classmates would party, it would be exceedingly rare. I would often only hang out with friends 3-5 times a month for no more than 2-3 hours. I simply didn’t have the time.
I don’t buy that the homework time is the same. I think the amount of homework that kids get is absolutely insane. When I would (rarely) miss school becaus I was sick, I realized how little I actually missed during the day; I was basically fine if I got my homework done.
If a boss told me in order to get a promotion (college) to a midlevel manager position I would have to work for 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, spend 2-3 hours 6 days a week for a mandatory but not mandatory activity (sports, band, plays, etc) to make my resume look better, spend another 4-6 hours after work and activities preparing for the next day, and and finally spend another 10-16 hours on the weekend learning more about my job I would be job hunting before the door closed behind me. Oh, and those mandatory activities? They cannot really be minimum wage jobs. They don’t seem to do a whole lot to impress the colleges.
All told, to get into a decent state shool you are looking at ~82 hours a week! Why is that at all acceptable? That is two 40 hour work weeks!
We are also at the point where kids have zero room for screwups. I have a family friend who is ~10 years younger than me. They had a C+/B- average freshman year. Became B+/A- into sophomore and junior year. They didn’t get into Pitt or PSU main campus (those are the in state schools) despite having solid extra cuticular activities for all the years. Essentially, an average semester at the start of their HS career sunk them getting into the main campus of the big state schools. 20-25 years ago, they are accepted to Pitt/PSU main campus without a second thought.
So, between the absurd amount of work/time it takes to get into a decent school and the utter lack of room to be anything but the best, no wonder teens aren’t doing anything with the very limited free time they have.
IMO, teens would be much better off with less homework, less demand on what it takes to get into a decent school, more time to work jobs, and more opportunity to be the odd kid/adult hybrids they are.