ABSTRACT
An adolescent’s regular day is filled with activities that he or she is rarely free to choose from, mainly related to school and personal maintenance. The activities we explicitly included in this study were sleeping; body care; eating; going to, being in, and coming back from school; homework; household chores; and shopping. According to our informal observations, many adolescents feel that these necessary activities take too much time in their lives, and they enjoy more their holidays and vacation times. In this respect, their situation is not very different from adults. In both cases, an overload of obligations is considered as an indicator of possible strain and subjective stress. Timmer, Eccles, and O’Brien (1985) reported that children aged 3 through 17 years old use 60% of their day time on what they called nondiscretionary activities (p. 365). A closer look at their findings showed that boys aged 12 through 17 years old used 70% of their time for such activities and that girls in the same age group used as much as 74% of their time for what we call necessary activities. This chapter is intended to give a description of these daily obligations in the 12 countries represented in Euronet.
