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Parental pressure, study burden pushing kids in Ludhiana into depression
Experts says burden of living up to the parents’ expectations makes child forget his personality.
The number of suicides among teenagers due to anxiety and depression is on the rise in city with news of teenagers giving up on their lives keep coming every other day.
On Wednesday too, a 13-year-old Class 7 boy was found hanging from a stair grill at his residence here. His father said that he was an average student and was keeping to himself since past few days.
Earlier on August 16, a 12-year-old boy ended his life by hanging himself from a ceiling fan at his house on Tibba road. The boy was reportedly weak in the studies.
In another incident, a 14-year-old girl of Class 9 hung herself at home after she failed to perform well in exams.
Reason for the trend
Dr Rajiv Gupta, a psychiatrist said that in foreign countries, the education policies are different than India and students there don’t feel burdened while our children find studying to be a punishment.
He said, “Adolescence is the age when a child needs to be handled with utmost caution and understanding as it is the character building age. Besides, the child too is curious to experiment. But they still are immature and that immaturity makes it difficult for them to handle the stress that is suddenly thrown at them.”
“Parents pressurise their children to opt for certain streams such as engineering or medical without taking into consideration their interests and aptitude. From there, the burden of living up to the parents’ expectations begins and the child begins to forget his own personality. This gradually becomes a mental stress for the child to cope up with parental expectations and compete with other students and leads to anxiety, unhappiness and depression,” said Dr Gupta.
Moreover, nowadays parents prefer distance education and don’t send their children to college for regular classes after schooling.
This trend is mostly followed by business class families who want their child to extend his/her help in the already-established business. Thus, a student who needs social environment to share his feelings, emotions and thoughts is forced to handle work at an early age. At this point, he could not able to tolerate the emotional pain and find himself under uncontrollable stress.
Conversing is the key
It is common for teenagers to think that nobody understands them and that the whole world is against them. However, in a few cases, the influence of peer pressure is such that it draws teenagers completely away from their family and friends who mean well. They then shut themselves off and fall into bad company.
The more extreme forms of pressure among the students propagate bad habits such as consumption of alcohol, smoking, drug abuse.
Although teenagers know that these are not good for them, yet they cultivate an excuse with the need to feel accepted. At this point of time, consequences don’t really occur to them.
Harmeet Kaur Waraich, said that the education system has become so marks oriented and children don’t enjoy anymore.
“Right from the primary classes, parents are ingraining in the mind of their kid that he needs to be a topper of the class. Education’s main purpose is to make a student an independent thinker but parents fling their unfulfilled ambitions on their children,” she said.
Dr Gupta advises the parents to keep an open and friendly relationship with their adolescent children and make them comfortable and inviting to tell them their problems and not be afraid of them.
“Parents need to see for signs of stress in their kids and make an effort to talk to the child or friends and teachers at school to know the cause. Communicating is the only key to curb student suicides,” he said.
