December may be a month full of holiday cheer, but for students, it unfortunately also equates to a month full of end-of-semester work overload and stress. Not only are students bombarded with a stress-inducing amount of assignments, they also have to find time to study for their huge and significant final exams which will be here only a week after this year’s short winter break.

This is enough to drive a student crazy, especially for someone who sets high standards for him or herself. However, students’ internal motivation is not the only pressure being imposed onto themselves; many students have parents whose expectations regarding grades are overpowering and sometimes felt to be overwhelmingly impossible. For this, many students feel as if there is no way out, that they must meet their parents’ expectations even if they feel as if they can’t.

Is this harming students and their academic potential? Possibly.

Instead of completing schoolwork out of pure motivation and interest, some students are doing it only to live up to what’s seen right in their parents’ eyes. Therefore, very little actual learning is allowed to happen and very little genuine interest is sparked. If you’re only doing something because of a reward (an A on a test) are you really doing it for your own personal benefit? Probably not. Learning should be about acquiring more knowledge about the things you are passionate about, not living up to the arbitrary and sometimes superficial expectations imposed onto yourself by your parents. This is your education, not theirs. Do your own personal best and that’s all that matters.

Not only do over-obsessed parents disallow true motivation and passion to shine through students, it also causes way more stress regarding schoolwork than should be needed. Final exams will be here shortly. A cumulative test over every subject you’ve learned throughout an entire semester is extremely stressful in itself, but adding the abundance of strict parents hovering over their kids and always expecting their children to get a perfect A into the mix is undoubtedly a recipe for failure. We are humans. We can only handle so much. When parents just arbitrarily expect their kids to get an A in every subject without knowing the parameters of each class the student might be taking, students turn from interested learners into reward-driven robots. Too much is too much.

“The biggest pressure is getting into a good college,” says junior Madisyn Kirkhove. “Parents are so afraid that if their kid doesn’t do well in school, then they won’t go anywhere in life. So kids do everything they can and stress themselves out just to meet their parents’ expectations.”

“I think it’s a problem all over the country,” adds sophomore Elyse Howard. “But I’m not affected by it because my parents don’t really care about me having perfect A’s. They only care if I’m not failing.”

The bottom line is to just do your personal best in school, and that may differ from person to person. Your parents’ high expectations really just boil down to them caring for you and wanting you to do well, but that can only go so far. Remember that this is your future, and it’s going to be what you make it out to be, not your parents.