High Life: A Weekly Forum for High School Students : Grades Are No. 1 Fear, Poll Finds

When it comes to expressing their biggest fears, today’s teen-agers aren’t preoccupied with such traditional concerns as being popular, getting a date or making the football team. A new survey of back-to-school attitudes shows that their overwhelming worry is not getting good grades.

Parents have a different set of worries, the survey found. As their children prepare for the new school year, parents are most concerned about peer pressure and crime or violence at school.

The survey, conducted last month for MasterCard by Bruskin-Goldring Research of Princeton, N.J., involved about 450 teen-agers and their parents at shopping malls and by telephone. It has a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Half the students surveyed said their biggest fear about the upcoming school year was not earning good grades. Just 15% said they feared not liking their teachers, 13% named crime or violence as a concern, and 8% said peer pressure might be a problem.

For parents, however, the fear that their child would not get good grades ranked third, below peer pressure and crime.

Besides earning high grades, teen-agers also want to make money: More than two-thirds of all teens plan to hold part-time jobs during the upcoming school year. The poll showed that the average amount of disposable income teens will have during the school year is $40 per week.

Baby-sitting is the occupation of choice for a third of the teen-agers polled, while 28% of those polled say they’ll end up working in restaurants or fast-food outlets. One in four teens plan to work at stores or other local businesses, while 22% will earn their cash through jobs around the home.

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“Friendship demands the ability to do without it.”

--Ralph Waldo Emerson