Home life and school work are both very stressful for STA sophomore Liz Wiens at the moment. Her parents are going through a divorce, leaving her mother a single parent, with one car, two teenage daughters to drive around, and one dissatisfying job.

“The divorce is obviously hard,” Liz said. “Nothing’s easy right now.”

With her mother, Ms. Cindy Wiens, unhappy and stressed out at home, Liz finds it harder to feel much other than discontent.

“My mother is uber stressed,” Liz said. “My mom dislikes her job [as a certified public accountant]. She is trying to support and transport two teenage daughters around and get through a divorce and manage her life and happiness.”

Liz also says that she is highly stressed at home, due to her parents’ recent divorce, her soccer commitments and her heavy homework load. Liz has, on average, 12 hours of homework a week from her advanced classes, which include College Spanish III, Honors Algebra II, Accelerated Geometry and Chemistry.

“School is definitely challenging,” Liz said. “I think I have a heavy workload, because of all my advanced classes, pressure to get a good [grade point average], and [my] homework amount.”

In other words’”high stress levels run in the family. According to a recent study done in Finland, parents who claim to be stressed out with work are more likely to have children who are also stressed with their schoolwork.

The study, entitled “Parents’ work burnout and adolescents’ school burnout: Are they shared?” defines “burnout” as exhaustion due to overwhelming school or work demands, which cause feelings of cynicism, detachment, inadequacy or powerlessness in the work or school environment. Liz and her mother have many common symptoms due to their stress. For instance, Cindy is not happy with her job because she feels a sense of inadequacy, as she wishes to have more influence, and make more of an impact on the world.

“My mom dislikes her job because she doesn’t feel like she is changing the world with her work which is a feeling she wishes to have,” Liz said.

Liz also experiences symptoms of being “burned out,” specifically the symptom of detachment.

“I’m a very daydreamy-type person,” Liz said. “I’m fairly certain about 70 percent of my time is spent thinking about other things during class. I just have a flighty mind.”

Like Liz and her mother, out of the 515 ninth-graders and 595 parents of the teens from the study, for parents who were found to be burned out, their children were more likely to also be burned out. The results from the questionnaire, which reached students from 11 different high schools in Finland, clearly showed that burnout in families is indeed “contagious.” According to a 2004 article, published in the Work & Stress Journal, this type of overwhelming stress impacts others directly and indirectly.

“An individual’s burnout ‘Ëœspills over’ to other life domains, such as the family,” the article states. “Therefore, it also affects the lives of many more people than those who are experiencing it directly.”

More specifically, the study states that stressed out parents and children are usually of the same gender.

The study also came to another conclusion: parents’ economic pressures also add stress to their children. The results show that the worse the parents’ economic situation, the higher the level of shared burnout in the family. The opposite was also found to be true.

“In many families, economic pressures generally bring budgetary matters to the fore in family [interaction], enhancing preoccupation with financial issues and thus generating frustration and anger,” the study states. “There is evidence that economic pressure felt by parents is a risk factor for adolescents’ internalizing problems, such as depressive symptoms.”

Liz and her family are also experiencing stress due to their economic pressures, which have worsened recently, especially in light of the divorce.

“I’m pretty stressed at home because of our financial state,” Wiens said.

Despite the likelihood of burnout for adolescents whose parents are also burned out, Professor Salmela-Aro states in her paper, “School-related Burnout during Educational Tracks: Antecedents and Consequences,” that it is important for teachers and schools to hinder the problem of burnout at an early age.

“Students in senior high school need in particular positive motivation such as encouragement, interest shown in them and fairness from their teachers to prevent them from burning out at school,” Salmela-Aro said.