Coping with pressure

I begin this piece with a sad incident. Not too long ago, my friend's niece committed suicide. All of 16, she was a charming young girl, a bright student who was doing well at school and seemed reasonably well adjusted. She was soon to appear for her Class X board examinations. There was no apparent reason for her actions and when the parents thought about it -and were pushed to come up with an explanation - they felt that perhaps the academic pressure was what pushed her to take this extreme step.

As with all child suicides - since one cannot enter the child's mind - one chooses to believe what is the most believable and in many cases the most acceptable explanation to the parents. Whether this was the real reason or not in this particular case, there is no denying the fact that society has become far more performance-driven than ever before, and the extent of it has reached scary proportions - both in India and overseas.

When we were growing up as children, we were always encouraged to do our best. Parents were focused but they were not obsessed with results. In our time, parents by and large put their wards in a good school and put their feet up, letting the school do its job. They were good conscientious parents but they didn't live their lives through ours.

But somewhere between the 1980s and 1990s, things changed dramatically. It begins right from the word go. Milestones - crawling, smiling, the first spoken word, walking - are recorded and there is intense discussion on who did what first. Mothers spend hours comparing notes on their toddlers. Children reach school-going age and there is pressure to put them into the best schools. Kindergartens and play schools are actively discussed and pursued. Three-four year olds often travel the distance from Gurgaon and Noida to Delhi to be in the "right" play school.

Competition for admission into the best schools reaches scary magnitudes and people stop at nothing to get their children into the most prestigious ones. Then comes college and further studies, and the pressure only keeps mounting.

What's also changed is that the competitive urge is on all fronts. It's no longer only academic - competition is on every parameter one can humanly think of. As a result, when one looks around today, one sees many children - and even parents - cracking under the pressure society puts on them. Cases of suicide and drug abuse are on the rise and there seems no end in sight.

I spoke to two psychologists whom I happen to know to ask them why this was happening to the extent we see and what parents could do to deal with this change. They pointed out a few things that seem worth repeating.

In the performance-driven society we live in, pressure isn't likely to reduce in a hurry. So parents - and children in turn - need to find better ways to deal with it. With families turning more nuclear by the day, the support system one had in the past is eroding. Faced with this, parents need to be alert. If a child is crumbling under pressure, there are several early warning signs and parents need to be more intuitive and alert. For instance - as one of them pointed out - a socially well-adjusted child displaying signs of anti-social behaviour is a sure sign of trouble. Problems arise when parents choose to ignore the warning signs or are too pre-occupied to see them.

As with everything else, a lot depends on the parents themselves. A tense parent is likely to raise a tense child. If the parents are themselves wired up, they have almost no hope of raising a calm, confident child. Of course, children come with their inherent attitudes and nature, but nurturing is in your hands. What children see around them is what they imbibe.

The anxiety gets compounded when parental love appears conditional upon performance. If a child ends up feeling that his parents' love depends on how well he does academically or otherwise, it is a recipe for disaster.

Moreover, parents need to stop expecting the moon. Whether the parents themselves were overachievers or not, they seem to want their children to outperform others. Effort is usually not recognised and applauded; only outcomes. Whether you are raising an academic scholar or a well-adjusted compassionate human being is a choice parents make.

And above all, parents need to remember that children don't need to be good at everything. They need to find what they are good at and try and be the best at that.

anjulibhargava@gmail.com